Nobody’s hollering “yeehaw.” 

At least not yet.

Still, my partner in time and editor Stephanie and I are raring to head back to Buddy Boy Winery where one of my favorite wines, semi-dry Cove Mountain Red, reminds me of autumn apple orchards, rugged ridge runners and homey hayrides under an October moon.

We’re equally psyched about planning a small party at Buddy Boy to launch my latest book, Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories. All my tales both true and fictitious are set not far from the Perry County winery in the Cove where I grew up just a few miles from the Appalachian Trail that runs down the main street in Duncannon, Pennsylvania.

Buddy Boy Winery is where William and Coreena Warner make their pure Appalachian American wines and offer old-fashioned hillbilly hospitality to anybody who makes the deep drive into the Cove.

Among other wines teaberry is a house favorite. I’ll bet you a dozen ears of sweet corn most American wine drinkers, especially California aficionados, never even heard of let alone drank teaberry wine. I chewed Clark’s teaberry gum as a Cove kid and teaberry remains high on my list of favorite ice cream flavors. Red pea-sized teaberries grow wild in the mountain hills and are good for the country-fried soul. You never ate teaberry ice cream in California, either, did you?

At 75 I’m proud to be an untamed organic, free-range Cove-raised Appalachian American boy, even if my late friend Sonny Drake (who plays a meaningful role in my book) and I grew up in the “Gateway to the Cove” beside Route 11/15, the railroad tracks and the Susquehanna River rather in secluded Cove where Buddy Boy rules.

Nothing but nature’s pure beauty lies in between.

Driving about three miles to Buddy Boy from Schoolhouse Road and Sawmill Road where Sonny and I lived, a canopy of old leaning trees opens into wide-open countryside green in rainy summer and white in snowy winter, stretching nature’s ecosystem into fresh farmland still thick in early September with spacious corn fields. On perfect blue-sky days, snug hills roll beneath lush mountain ridges that envelop the unique horseshoe-shaped Cove, the reason some original settlers called this piece of country-time paradise Cove in the first place.

Stephanie and I can think of no better place than Buddy Boy Winery to throw a party to launch my book.

So meet us there.

Tentatively scheduled for Saturday, October 3, between 2 and 4 p.m., we’ll bring a box of books I’ll sign and sell like an old-time huckster hawking pots and pans and sharpening hunting knives off the back of my mule-drawn wagon.

We’ll enjoy Buddy Boy wine, Pennsylvania beer, good food and friendship.

Buddy Boy is easy to find just past the big pig that runs to the fence to greet visitors on Cove Road if you stop to say hello. I call him Arnold after the famous porker on the retro TV show “Green Acres” and, like me, he’s proud to be from the Cove. Green Acres might be the place to be, like the theme song says, but Buddy Boy is hog heaven, too.

Join us to find refuge in the Cove and escape the fate of drifting up shit creek.

Oink if you like drinking hillbilly wine.