Sunday Edition | Issue #8 | March 22, 2026

The Wayne Train is a free weekly newsletter about Appalachian culture, history, food, and storytelling. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here to receive The Wayne Train every Sunday morning in your inbox. If you already subscribed, for goodness sake forward this immediately. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. www.thewaynetrain.com

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🚂 WELCOME ABOARD
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This week on The Wayne Train

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📡 DISPATCHES FROM THE DIGITAL HOLLER
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Ah, Springtime in Kentucky.

The sweet sounds of nature fill the air.

Birds chirping. Wind blowing gently through the trees. My neighbor cussing my other neighbor’s dog again.

You know what else fills the air this time of year?

Pollen.

Not a little. Not a dusting. I mean literal tons of the stuff — and if you live in Kentucky, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Enough to coat your car, your porch furniture, your truck, your dog, your will to live.

You don't even need a calendar. You know spring has arrived when your windshield looks like somebody gift-wrapped it in yellow flannel. When you sneeze so hard your hat moves. When you walk outside with your coffee and come back inside holding a cup of something that used to be coffee.

A light breeze in April isn't romantic in Kentucky.

It's a delivery system.

The trees aren't blooming. They're billing you. And the whole state is paying, cash up front, whether they signed up for it or not.

You can watch it move. A yellow cloud rolling slow across a parking lot like something out of a disaster film nobody greenlit. Except nobody evacuates. You just squint, hold your breath, and walk a little faster toward the Kroger.

And Kroger knows.

Tissues are front and center by late March. Not one brand. Four brands. A whole wall of soft surrender positioned right between the bread and the blood pressure monitors, which is either a coincidence or the greatest retail strategy in American history.

I've lived in these hills a good bit of my life and it still drops me every spring like a bad punch I didn't see coming. I'll stand on the porch in late March, coffee in hand, watching the redbuds come in, looking like a man who has learned something from his years on this earth.

I have not.

By the second week of April I'm indoors, shades drawn, watching the pollen settle on the windshield like slow yellow snow while I eat cereal and breathe through my mouth like a golden retriever.

My eyes are running. My nose is running. Everything is running except me.

The dogwoods don't care. The redbuds don't care. The hills turn from grey to a hundred shades of green in about ten days flat and they do it every year with zero apology and zero interest in my sinuses.

Gorgeous.

Miserable.

Sometimes both at once.

Which, come to think of it, is a pretty fair description of spring in Kentucky.

Wayne Knuckles is a 40-plus year 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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📜 FEATURED STORY OF THE WEEK
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There was a time, before cable television and Amazon Prime and every dopamine hit in the world delivered straight to your pocket, when the most exciting thing that could happen in a small Appalachian town was a poster nailed to the wall of the feed store.

The circus is coming.

Three words. That's all it took.

Schools emptied. Banks closed. People who had never left the hollow in their lives loaded into wagons and walked for miles down roads that barely deserved the name.

At its peak in the late nineteenth century, "Circus Day" ranked right alongside Christmas and the Fourth of July in American culture. Not for New York. Not for Philadelphia.
This was for people who had nothing else.

That's the part that matters.

Read the story here

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🗞 APPALACHIA IN THE NEWS
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No one has ever doubted the Appalachian Trail is popular. But now it’s clear that this trail sees more visitors than the most popular national parks in the U.S.

Thanks to creative data gathering by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) and National Park Service (NPS), we now know that the trail had 16.9 million visits in 2025. That’s more than any single site within the national park system last year. It’s more than the Blue Ridge Parkway (16.5 million), the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (15.7 million), and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (11.5 million).

Read the story here

Bath County, Kentucky just celebrated an anniversary you don't hear about every day.

The Meat Shower of 1876.

That’s right. Raw meat falling from a clear sky. Onto a farm.

Rebecca Crouch was outside making soap when it happened. No clouds. No explanation. Just meat, coming down like the world's worst weather event.

Fast forward to this month. Dozens of people crowded around Kurt Gohde at the Bath County History Museum. He's a Transylvania University professor who's been obsessed with this story for over twenty years. In his hands, a glass jar holding a sample from the original shower.

Andrew Cruse drove in from eastern Kentucky. He'd heard the legend for years.

"You hear about it and assume it's kind of urban legend," he said. "But it's actually... there's a piece of it."

Read the story here

Before coal became king, another mineral ruled the hills of Eastern Kentucky: salt. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, salt was not only essential to survival—it was the backbone of Appalachian economy and migration. Across the rugged hills of Pike, Clay, and Perry Counties, salt licks and brine springs drew long hunters, settlers, and entrepreneurs deep into what was then the Western frontier.

Before railroads or coal mines, before formal counties or courthouses, salt licks—natural springs where animals and people sought mineral-rich water—were among the first destinations for westward migrants. Following buffalo trails and Native paths, pioneers like Daniel Boone passed through the Cumberland Gap and followed the Great Warrior’s Path into Kentucky in search of land, fresh water, and this precious mineral.

Read the story here

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🗞 KAY’S CORNER
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My mamaw’s home was an old log house down in one of the hollows of Jackson County Ky.  Oh, the love that was in that old log house!

My aunt lived with mamaw after papaw passed away. My aunt was one of the best cooks ever. Hands down, she could fix a meal to feed an army with seemingly little effort.

Each Sunday as long as I can remember during my childhood, after church the family would gather at mamaw’s house. It wasn’t unusual for there to be 20-25 family members, and sometimes friends and neighbors. Somehow there was always enough food. No one was ever turned away.

Many memories flood my mind when I think of my mamaw’s kitchen.

There was a rough cut wooden table that would seat 12 at a time. Then there was the old wood stove that aunt cooked all those meals on.

And I can’t forget the water bucket and dipper that everyone used, and we lived through it!

After being seated there was always a prayer of thanksgiving for the food provided. The men always ate first then women and children.

To be honest, we as kids were so busy playing outside sometimes it would be difficult to round us all up to come eat. But, the meal was always delicious and left us looking forward to next Sunday.

Oh, those precious memories!

Bible Verse of the Week:

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, rejoice.

Philippians 4:4

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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Visit all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time

Watauga County sits in the northwestern corner of North Carolina like somebody stacked the mountains and forgot to stop. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs along its spine, the New River cuts through its belly, and Boone — the county seat — sits at roughly 3,300 feet above sea level, which means summer actually feels like summer is supposed to feel and winter will remind you that you are small and unprepared. About 60,000 people call it home, though that number swells every fall when the leaves do their annual show-off routine and every winter when the ski crowd rolls in with their roof racks and their optimism.

Appalachian State University is the beating heart of modern Boone, turning what could have been a sleepy mountain town into something with coffee shops, live music, and opinions. The university pulls around 20,000 students into a county that size, which creates this beautiful cultural collision between fifth-generation mountain families and kids from Charlotte who just discovered flannel. It works, mostly. The town has grit underneath its artsy veneer — farming, logging, and livestock still matter out in the county's hollows and ridgelines, and nobody lets you forget it.

Read the story here

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📜 APPALACHIAN ALMANAC
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THE SEASON

The vernal equinox passed Thursday, March 20. Daylight now has the upper hand. From here through late June, the region gains roughly two and a half minutes of light per day. By week's end, dusk will push past 7 p.m. across the central Appalachians.

Expect the full March package: mornings in the thirties, afternoons climbing to the low sixties mid-week, and a freeze threat creeping back by the weekend. Keep seedlings inside. Keep the flannel shirt within reach.

THE SKY

The Full Worm Moon peaked on March 3, and the new moon arrived on March 18. This week the moon is waxing toward first quarter, which comes on March 25.

The name Worm Moon reflects a time when winter begins to loosen its hold — when daylight increases, snow retreats, and the land shows its first signs of change. Historical research suggests the name may trace to beetle larvae emerging from thawing tree bark, not earthworms alone. Either way, the name marks the same moment: the ground is waking up.

THE GROUND

Red maples are already in bloom at lower elevations. Serviceberry — known locally as "sarvis" — is a traditional Southern Appalachian harbinger of spring, its small ragged blossoms appearing to float among bare branches before most other trees show any sign of life. It blooms first on south-facing slopes. It has always bloomed first. Old-timers scheduled burials around it — earliest bloom meant the ground had thawed deep enough to dig.

Spring ephemerals are beginning their brief run at lower elevations: trout lily, hepatica, bloodroot. They will be gone before the canopy closes in May.

THE FORAGER

Morel season in the Appalachian region runs mid-March through mid-June, supporting roughly ten species, typically found near hardwood trees — dying elm and ash in particular. Soil temperature is the reliable trigger. When it holds consistently at 50°F, conditions are right. South-facing slopes warm first; start there. Most of the region is still running a few degrees short. Close, but not yet.

Watch the serviceberry. When it blooms heavy, the ground is getting there.

THE WORD

March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.

This year, the lion is staying through the weekend. Mind the fruit trees. One hard freeze can take the early bloom.

Season's watching.

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📜 THE BACK PAGE
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Long before the county ever thought about asphalt, Appalachian communities had a problem. Creeks and rivers didn't care about your schedule. They flooded in spring, ran shallow in August, and sat between you and everything you needed — the school, the store, the doctor, the church — and didn’t care one bit.

So they built bridges that moved.

Swinging bridges, suspension bridges, foot bridges — different names depending on which hollow you grew up in. The design was ancient and simple. Two anchored towers, cables strung between them, wooden planks laid across. The flexibility was the whole engineering secret. Rigid bridges fought the water and lost. A swinging bridge gave a little, absorbed the force, and kept standing.

They were community infrastructure the way a well was community infrastructure. Families built them together. Maintained them together. A washed-out bridge wasn't just an inconvenience — it was an isolation sentence.

At their peak, swinging bridges were a common sight over Appalachian creeks and rivers.

Most are gone now.

A few hundred survive, some maintained as historical landmarks, some just quietly hanging on in hollows where the modern world hasn't fully arrived yet.

Still swaying.

Still doing the job.