The Wayne Train will be pulling into the ol’ repair shed next week during the Fourth of July holiday weekend, so there won’t be an issue for July 5. Look for us to get back on the track begining July 12.

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📡 FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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Every town had one.

You wouldn't find him in the phone book. No storefront. No license on the wall. No sign blinking out by the highway.

He had a car. That was the whole operation.

A few days before the Fourth, he'd aim it south toward Tennessee with an empty trunk and a roll of cash in his shirt pocket.

The good fireworks were illegal in Kentucky back then. The kind that left the ground. The kind that went bang. Bottle rockets, Roman candles, anything with real fire in it — against the law. A boy could buy himself a sparkler and that was about the end of it.

Cross the line into Tennessee and they sold it right off the road. Legal as a loaf of bread.

That's why he went south.

Nobody knew exactly where he went. Somewhere across the line, where the fireworks stands sprouted along the road like mushrooms after a warm rain. They had names a kid never forgot. Big Daddy's Boom Barn. Uncle Sam's Explosive Warehouse. Patriot Fireworks, lit up and open late.

He'd come back after dark with the back end of that car riding low.

Trunk packed tight. Roman candles. Bottle rockets. Firecrackers, sparklers, smoke bombs. Those little black pellets that grew into long curling snakes when you lit them on the sidewalk and stunk up the whole porch.

Cherry bombs, too. Or things everybody called cherry bombs. Silver salutes. M-80s. Strings of Black Cats wrapped in red paper, that mean-looking cat on the front like it might come off the package and scratch you.

For about a week, his car was the busiest business in town.

He'd park behind the grocery. Beside the service station. Down by the ball field. Sometimes he just sold out of his own driveway. Sometimes he opened the trunk wherever folks tracked him down.

Word moved fast.

"He's back from Tennessee."

That was the whole sentence. Didn't need another word.

Kids started checking their pockets. Quarters saved up from mowing yards and hauling pop bottles back to the store suddenly had a job to do. A dollar bought enough noise to make a boy feel like he'd won a small war.

Parents knew. Some of them fussed about it. Most just looked the other way.

Now, the man understood his customers.

For the little ones he had the legal stuff — sparklers and smoke bombs. Sparklers seemed harmless enough, till you learned the wire stayed hot a good while after the pretty part quit. Smoke bombs came in every color on the box and always burned the same dirty purple-gray before rolling off under the steps.

The older boys wanted firecrackers and bottle rockets. The illegal kind. The kind that made the trip worth taking.

Now a bottle rocket was supposed to go in a bottle. Pointed up. At the sky. That was the idea, anyway. What actually happened was they got fired off fence posts and drainpipes and out of a bare hand if a boy was feeling brave. They screamed across the field, over the garage, through the trees, and popped somewhere you couldn't quite see.

Roman candles got even less respect. Directions said stick it in the ground. Every boy I knew held it like a pistol and fired colored balls across the yard while his mama hollered from the porch.

The fireworks man didn't offer much in the way of safety tips.

He was a merchant, not a philosopher.

He kept his stock in cardboard boxes. That trunk smelled like gunpowder and paper and gasoline, a smell I'd know blindfolded to this day. Money went folded in his shirt pocket or down in an old cigar box. No receipts. No sales tax. Nobody asked your age or your business.

You pointed.

He named a price.

That was the deal.

By the afternoon of the Fourth, the good stuff was long gone. What was left were bent sparklers, half-torn packs of firecrackers, and a few oddball items whose labels promised a whole lot more than they ever delivered.

Then the sun went down, and the town let loose.

Firecrackers snapping along the sidewalks. Bottle rockets going up out of the backyards. Roman candles throwing red and green over the gardens and the clotheslines. Dogs gone under the bed. Babies crying. Fathers standing out in the grass with a garden hose close by, pretending the whole thing was under control.

It was nothing like what people pay to see now. No music timed to the booms. No computer running a finale. No giant shells opening up over a stadium.

But when you're ten years old, barefoot in the grass with a sparkler going in your hand, the whole sky belongs to you.

By the morning of the fifth, the streets were littered with red paper. Burnt rocket sticks in the grass. Smoke still hanging faint in the air.

The fireworks man shut his trunk.

Done for another year.

Nobody thought of him as part of anything. He wasn't a tradition. He was just a fellow making a little extra money driving to Tennessee and hauling back what the rest of us wanted.

But he belonged to the Fourth same as watermelon and burnt hamburgers and the flag off the front porch.

And the law? The law was somewhere else that week.

He brought the holiday home in cardboard boxes.

And for a few nights every summer, out of the open trunk of an old car, he sold thunder by the piece.

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.

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🗞 APPALACHIA 250
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Flip over a flat rock by any creek up here and you'll probably find one. A salamander. We called them water dogs when I was a boy. Little thing. Wet-looking.

Sits there blinking at the daylight you just let in on it like you've interrupted something.
You have.

That salamander is sitting on the oldest ground in North America.

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These mountains are old in a way that's hard to hold in your head.

The building of them started around 480 million years ago, and the rock underneath goes back more than a billion. To get your mind around that you have to go back before there were dinosaurs. Before there were trees — real ones, with bark and rings. The Appalachians were already standing when the first tree on earth figured out how to grow tall.

They were giants once, too. As tall as the Rockies. Some geologists will tell you as tall as the Himalayas, back at the start.
Then time went to work on them.

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Four hundred million years of rain and ice and wind, wearing the sharp edges down to the soft green ridges we've got now. What you're looking at when you look at a

Kentucky mountain isn't a small mountain. It's the worn-down stub of an enormous one.

The Himalayas are babies next to these. Ours just got here first and paid for it.

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All that time bought us something nobody planned.

Life. More of it, packed tighter, than about anywhere in the temperate world.
When the ice ages came grinding down out of the north, the cold shoved every living thing ahead of it like a snowplow.

Most mountain ranges run east to west, and life got pinned against them and froze. Ours run north to south. The plants and animals just moved downhill ahead of the ice, waited it out, and walked back up when it left. Nothing got trapped. Nothing got wiped clean.

—

So here's what we ended up with.

More kinds of tree in these southern mountains than in all of Western Europe put together.

More salamanders than anywhere else on the face of the earth — better than thirty kinds in the Smokies alone. A third of all the salamander species on the planet live on this continent, and most of those live right here.

Down in the cold streams there's the hellbender, a salamander that runs over two feet long and looks like something the creek dreamed up on a dare.

The writer Barbara Kingsolver said the flag of Appalachia ought to be a salamander.
She's not wrong.

Here's the thing about ground this old.

It doesn't keep score.

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Crack open a chunk of gray rock on a road cut up here and you can find the shell of something that lived in a warm, shallow sea — a sea that covered all of this and drained off again a long time before the first dinosaur drew breath. These mountains have been a seabed. They've been a range as tall as anything on earth. They've been buried, lifted, frozen, and ground back down to what you see out the kitchen window.

They watched the ice come down out of Canada. They watched it pull back.

They watched the American chestnut grow up to be one of every four trees in this forest — and watched a blight come over on imported nursery stock and take the biggest tree in the woods clean out, inside a few decades. The old people still talk about that one like a death in the family, because it was.

The mountains didn't flinch.

That's what you come to understand, living in the shadow of something this old. Whatever happens to you — whatever happens to the country — already happened to these hills, ten times over, in languages nobody was around to write down.

So that's the land. The oldest thing we've got, and the one thing up here that doesn't need us at all.

It was here before the Cherokee. Before Boone. Before the country we're about to throw a 250th birthday party for — which, set next to 480 million years, is about how long it takes that salamander to blink.

The country is young.

The ground it stands on is not.

Put the rock back when you're done looking. There's somebody under there older than all of us, and he was here first.

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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The Energy Tug-of-WAr
The Tennessee Valley Authority is looking to the next 25 years, and their latest draft plan has sparked plenty of conversation. With the massive power demands from AI and new data centers outpacing their original forecasts, they’re leaning heavily into new natural gas capacity while keeping legacy coal plants on the grid through 2039. They’ve opened up a public comment period, and it’s a critical chance for folks in the valley to weigh in on how to power our future before the board makes their final decision in August.

👉 Read the full story

Norovirus outbreak reported along Appalachian Train
If you or anyone you know is currently trekking the Appalachian Trail through Virginia, please take extra care. Officials have confirmed a suspected norovirus outbreak between Buena Vista and Waynesboro, with additional cases reported at the Blackrock Hut in Shenandoah National Park. The park service is urging hikers to step up their sanitation—boil that water, skip the shared gear, and wash up with soap and water, as standard sanitizer doesn't always cut it with this bug.

👉 Read the full story

Good news for the outdoor economy in Ohio

In a bit of a last-minute victory for the outdoor economy, Governor Mike DeWine issued a line-item veto this week to save $750,000 in funding for the Outdoor Recreation Council of Appalachia. The cut had been tucked into a house bill and would have effectively hamstrung the organization that manages the Baileys Trail System. The Governor’s decision keeps the gears turning for the visitor hub and trailhead projects that have been vital to bringing more tourism and economic activity into the Athens area.

👉 Read the full story

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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I have always loved the 4th of July activities and festivities. I appreciate what July 4 represents, our freedom. I never want to take for granted the freedom that I have as an American citizen. I respect and pledge my allegiance to the US flag and what it stands for.

When I was a younger girl, I always looked forward to July 4 because it meant that we got to go celebrate. Our celebration was daddy and mommy taking the family to the drive-in theater in McKee.  Daddy would drive his pickup truck, and all us kids would ride in the bed of the truck. What a time we had, my brothers and I. Some folks would spread a quilt on the ground, some would sit on top of their car or truck to watch the fireworks.

I do believe, as I remember, that most all of the county would be at this event. There would be cars and trucks parked everywhere. When the drive-in lot was full, then people would park alongside the roadway.

The fireworks were the biggest, brightest, best show one could ever dream of.
The colors, the brightness, and booms were incredibly so much joy and fun for me. I can still imagine being there and the excitement I had.

When I was around 5 or 6 years of age, I remember so well the 4th of July. We lived on a farm, and daddy had a cow that was expecting a calf to be born most anytime. Daddy told me that when the calf was born, it would be mine.

Mommy and daddy always got up early to do the morning chores before the  younger kids were woke up. On this particular July 4 morning, when my parents went to the barn to milk the cows, they discovered a newborn calf.

Daddy came back to the house and woke me up and told me there was a surprise for my birthday, a newborn calf, and it was mine!  I hurriedly got dressed and ran to the barn as fast as I could go. And there it was, a little gray calf, and it was mine. That was the prettiest calf I can ever remember.

Yes, you read that correctly, July 4 is my birthday. I tell people when they ask about my birthday that I was the biggest bang my mommy ever had.

I’m proud to share the same day as the beloved country that I live in.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Bible Verse of the Week

Galatians 5:1
Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewithal Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

Gospel singer Kay Himes Knuckles has been sharing her music ministry in Eastern and Central Kentucky for more than 40 years.

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📜 KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS
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The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

There's a creek running through Campton named for a man who came looking for silver and never found a dime of it.

John Swift. Or Jonathan. The records can't agree, which feels about right for a fellow who might not have existed at all. The story goes he buried a fortune somewhere in these hills, back before Kentucky was Kentucky. Silver bars. A smelting furnace. A cave with the mouth caved in on purpose. Men have been digging for it ever since. Two hundred years of shovels. Nobody's hit it.

They named the creek after him anyway. Swift Camp Creek. And every Labor Day, Campton throws a festival for a treasure that was never there.

That's Wolfe County in one sentence. A place that'll throw a parade for the thing it never got.

The county itself is a patchwork. When they drew it up in 1860, they didn't carve it out of open land. They took a piece of Breathitt. A piece of Morgan. A slice off Owsley and a corner of Powell. Four counties chipped in their leftovers, and what came out was Wolfe — 223 square miles of hill and holler with hardly a flat acre to its name.

They named it for Nathaniel Wolfe. A lawyer down in Louisville. A sharp one, by all accounts, who argued criminal cases and sat in the legislature. Far as anybody can tell, he never lived a day of his life up here. Never climbed a single one of these ridges. But his name's on the courthouse, and that courthouse has burned to the ground twice and been rebuilt three times. The name outlasted the buildings.

Campton's the seat. Started life as Camp Town, named for an old campsite somebody stumbled on by the creek. A man called Nim Wills usually gets the credit for it. First real building went up around 1818. The town's still small. You could fit the whole of Campton into a decent high school gym and still have room for the band.

Wolfe County was poor early and stayed poor a long while. Cut off in the hills, no railroad worth the name until 1907, when a narrow-gauge line finally came clattering in to haul out the timber. The isolation was bad enough that church mission societies took notice. They came in and built schools. Hazel Green Academy went up in 1880, started as a college-prep school for mountain kids who'd otherwise have gotten nothing past the sixth grade. Outsiders looked at this place and saw a problem to fix.

The people who lived here just called it home.

A county with no flat ground does have one thing in spades, though.

Cliffs.

Wolfe County sits on the edge of the Red River Gorge, and a good slab of the Daniel Boone National Forest spills over into it. Sandstone. Arches the wind cut out over a few million years. Cliff lines that drop a hundred feet straight down and don't apologize for it. People come from all over the world to climb that rock. Grown adults fly in from countries I couldn't find on a map to go hang off a wall in eastern Kentucky.

And out at a place called Torrent Falls, somebody did a thing nobody in America had done before.

They built the first via ferrata in the country.

Via ferrata. Italian. Means "iron road." It's a climbing route with cables and iron rungs bolted into the rock, so a regular person — somebody with two good knees and no death wish — can get up a cliff face without being a climber. A horseshoe canyon. A waterfall. A hundred and twenty feet of air under your boots. The first one in the United States, and it's tucked in a county most Kentuckians couldn't find on a map. Opened in 2001. Folks have been clipping in ever since.

Then there's the people.

Edgar Tolson is the one the art world knows. Born in 1904 over near Lee City, fourth of eleven kids, schooled to the sixth grade and no further. He worked the way everybody worked — carpenter, stonemason, sawmill, a stretch of preaching. He whittled his whole life and thought nothing of it. Then a stroke knocked him flat in 1957, and when he came back, he came back carving. Pocketknife. Poplar. Plain little figures of Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the garden, carved over and over, a hundred times maybe. City people lost their minds over them. He ended up in the Whitney Museum's big show in 1973, the only folk artist they invited. A man with a sixth-grade education and a pocketknife, hung on a wall in Manhattan. He died in Campton in 1984. His carvings sell for more now than he made his whole life.

Tyler Booth came up a lot more recently and a lot louder. Raised right there in Campton, in a house split down the middle — his daddy ran a rock band, his grandparents spun the old country records. The country won. He's got the kind of low baritone that stops you mid-sentence, and he signed with a Nashville label and sang alongside Brooks and Dunn on one of their records. Then he did the thing not many do. He came home. Said the songs come easier where he's from.

And before either of them, there was Pete Center, who threw a baseball hard enough to make it to the Cleveland Indians back in the 1940s. From these hills to a big-league mound.

If you go — and you should — you'll get hungry. Skip whatever's got a drive-thru. Find The Wicked Wolfe, tucked behind a little shop in Campton, family-run, the kind of place where the biscuits and gravy come off somebody's stove and not out of a freezer truck. People stumble in off the rock, dirty and worn out, for the burgers and the tater kegs and a milkshake. It's small. It's good. That's the whole review.

Two hundred years they dug for Swift's silver. Tore up the creek banks. Crawled under rock ledges with lanterns. Came up with mud and stories.

They were standing on it the whole time. The rock people cross oceans to climb. A woodcarver's quiet genius. A kid who left for Nashville and couldn't stay gone.

The silver was never buried.

It just didn't look like silver.

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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The moon's the headliner this week, and she's playing it coy.

Full Strawberry Moon rises the night of June 29. Old name, comes from the Cherokee and other tribes who marked it as berry-picking time, not from the color. It won't look red. It'll look big and low and orange coming up over the ridge, the way the summer moon always does.

Here's the part the calendar won't tell you. This is a micromoon. Farthest full moon of the stretch, about 251,000 miles out against an average of around 238,000. So it's the runt of the litter. Smallest, dimmest full moon you'll get this year.

You won't notice. Nobody ever does. A full moon over the mountains looks like a full moon. The math is just showing off.

On the 28th, the night before, the moon hangs near the Teapot — that little dipper-looking cluster of stars in Sagittarius, low in the south. Pour yourself something while you look at it. Seems only right.

Venus owns the west after sundown. Brightest thing up there. You'll see it before the sky's even done getting dark (. Jupiter's sliding down toward the horizon, getting harder to catch as the week goes.

Early risers get the better show. Saturn and Mars sit in the eastern sky before dawn, and Mars is sliding right past the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters — for the last time you'll see it until 2034 . Eight years. Worth setting an alarm.

By July 2, four planets are up at once through the night, with the moon gone soft and gibbous .

And straight overhead, the Summer Triangle. Three bright stars — Vega, Altair, Deneb . They'll be up there till December. Old friends. They don't go anywhere.

Let me save you a drive.

Every year about this time somebody asks how to get tickets to see the synchronous fireflies up in the Smokies. The ones that all blink together, like the whole forest is breathing. It's a real thing. It's wonderful. There's a lottery and everything .

It's also over. That show peaks in early June and it's done by now .

But walk out in your own yard after dark this week and look.

Those are fireflies too. Photinus pyralis, if you want to get fancy about it. The common one. Folks call it the Big Dipper for the little J-hook it draws in the air when it flashes . No lottery. No tickets. No two-hour drive and a park ranger telling you to hush.

Here's what gets me about them. That bug spent a year, maybe two, underground in the dirt as a grub before it ever lit up . Two years in the dark to get three, four weeks of summer with a lantern on its tail. And what does it do with the time? Tries to find somebody. That's the whole plan.

They need the dark to do it. Real dark. Leave a floodlight burning on the porch all night and they can't find each other to save their lives . So maybe cut the light off for a few nights. Let 'em get on with it.

The St. John's Wort is blooming yellow along the fence rows in some states now, and the bee balm's coming on red . Bees love it. So do the hummingbirds, if you've got feeders out.

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THIS WEEK IN APPALACHIAN HISTORY

July 1 through 3, 1863. Gettysburg.

Three days, somewhere north of 46,000 men killed, wounded, or missing — the bloodiest piece of ground in American history up to that point (battlefields.org). You know the story. Turning point of the war. Pickett's Charge. Lincoln's 272 words that November.

Here's the part that doesn't make the movies.

These mountains sent men to both ends of that field. Appalachia never voted clean for one flag. A holler in East Tennessee might raise boys for the Union while the next county over filled out gray. Kin against kin. Same accent shouting across the same smoke.

That's the thing about this region nobody outside it ever gets right. It was never one thing. It was a hundred arguments that happened to share a mountain range.

And then there's the 4th.

Two hundred and fifty years, this Saturday, since a room full of men in Philadelphia signed their names to a piece of paper that could've gotten every one of them hanged. Same week, 1863, Lee started his long wet retreat back south from Gettysburg, and out west Vicksburg fell the very same day . The country nearly came apart on the anniversary of the day it was born.

It held. Barely. It usually does.

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A CLOSING NOTE

The Census Bureau put out new numbers in March.

Across the sixty counties of Central Appalachia — eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwest Virginia, a corner of Tennessee — the region lost about 49,000 people in five years . McDowell County, West Virginia, had nearly 100,000 souls in 1950. It's down to 16,878 now . Harlan County, Kentucky, once topped 75,000. Call it 24,725 today.

It's not mostly people leaving anymore. That's the part that stops you. In most of these counties now, it's that more folks are dying than being born. You can chase jobs to bring the young ones home. You can't argue with a tombstone.

I'll tell you where I'm sitting while I write this, though.

Madison County. Berea, Richmond. Right here on the edge of it. And this county grew almost ten percent in the same five years . The interstate runs through it. There's two colleges. People are moving in.

So I'm looking at two Appalachias out my window. One that's filling up and one that's emptying out, and a couple ridgelines between them is all.

On the Fourth, somebody'll set off fireworks in both.

Same sky over both, too. The fireflies don't read the census.

Light one off for the porches that won't be there next time around.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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