Project Dateline

Photos By David Stephenson

DSTEPHENSON@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Story By Amy Wilson

AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

KNOT HOLE –

The only permanent living residents of this, um, town are red worms, mealworms and the aptly and atrociously named night crawlers.

They live in the refrigerator by the front counter, strategically placed like the big stores do to lure the buyer into an impulse purchase.

In the parlance, the big stores call that “cashier bait.”

But here, they’re, you know, bait bait.

Because not far is a lake where the fish do bite if offered up Knot Hole’s finest.

Let us begin by explaining that the only thing in Knot Hole — sometimes spelled Knott Hole because spelling does not matter a ding here — is the Peckerwood Grocery, a fixture on White Oak Road just outside Junction City since the early 1940s. The “new” store was built when the Pine Grove Store, there since 1900, came down from lack of interest and the free rein of wood rot.

You will know you are in Knot Hole when you see the Royal Crown Cola sign and two old gas pumps. You are out of it as soon as the gravel parking lot around the store gives way to anything not gravel.

“Peckerwood’s,” says Gragg Lunsford, answering the phone.

Gragg has been up since 5 a.m., cooking chili. That, teamed with a nice pimento cheese sandwich, will make up the day’s plate lunch offering.

Gragg is watching the Today show on a small TV that hangs in the front of the store. He likes to think of that TV as “the way Knot Hole stays informed of world events.” (The show’s anchors are currently trying out mattresses for sleepability.)

Knot Hole has never been a real town. Placed, as it is, on White Oak Road (on an extremely roundabout way to White Oak), “this is the knothole that fell out.”

Nobody in the store knows when the knot hole joke became cause to paint it on store signs and put it on “Knot Hole, Ky.” trucker caps ($4.50) and make like it was legitimate advertising.

Maybe it was sometime after the Wilburns took over the store from the Wilsons. Seems when the Wilsons were in charge, a lot of folks — “lot” being a relative term in a town without a population — used to call the burg Wilsonville because, says Gragg, “it was full of Wilsons.”

But Charlie Wilson, the 73-year-old son of original storekeeper Harlan, says the Wilsons didn’t call it Wilsonville, and that the store was called The Pine Grove Store because “it set in a bunch of pines and oaks which aren’t there now because we cleared ‘em.”

Harlan and his wife, Manda, are buried up behind the store now in the Wilson cemetery. They have a good view of the doings in Knot Hole if there is, in fact, a Knot Hole.

Allen King moseys in for his regular 7 a.m. repast: a breakfast sandwich, Mountain Dew and some Marlboros.

He’s here every day because “it’s home and someone has to keep Gragg awake.”

He reckons he might be a bona fide “Knot Holite.”

Every day there’s a plate lunch at Peckerwood’s. On Wednesdays, it’s a catfish fry, weather permitting. Wednesdays expand the population of Knot Hole considerably — what with tater wedges, cole slaw, baked beans and hush puppies rounding out the menu.

Other weekdays, it’s catch as catch can for plate lunches.

Every Friday night, it’s horseshoes, “weather permitting because we ain’t got no indoor horseshoe arena,” Gragg says, laughing. On Friday nights when the Ponderosa Raceway is racing, the store is open way past 9.

On hot days, the Mountain Dew fairly floats out of the store, business is so swift. And the “cones, fudgesicles and Klondikes” go swiftly at only 75 cents each. Every Sunday the store goes dark, because even the Lord took a rest.

Every day, Peckerwood’s has dry pinto beans sold by the cupful, a bag of 152 BBs for 42 cents and the very latest in ramen noodles.

Just as the inventory slows, in comes Gragg’s dad, Marvin, who is known in Knot Hole as Taterhead. Marvin says Gragg “saw potential here” and has dug in for the long haul.

Actually, Gragg bought the store in March and, after seeing whether he could make a go of it, quit his day job in August. He likes life a lot less stressful than it was when he was the modernization director for the city of Danville. The only downside is, there is less time to fish.

But more time to listen to the trains as they rumble near the highway. Or to hear the morning conversation of cardinals, grackles, robins, mockingbirds, blue jays, doves and a single rooster. Or to watch a great blue heron step into a nearby pond so slowly that no ripples ruin his reflection.

It is almost always slow.

The gas pumps do 1,000 gallons of business in a week. The pay phone — “we have all the modern conveniences” — rings a few times a day.

“We even got clocks you don’t have to wind,” Taterhead says with a smile.

But you are encouraged not to loiter, not to ask about the bathroom and not to notice the expiration date on the strawberry Moon Pies.

All in all, Knot Hole is a right fine place to buy Jell-O and crackers and Pennzoil and jowl bacon for $2.49 a pound.

Plans to expand the Peckerwood Grocery have been approved. The town will grow by a good 400 square feet of restaurant so that the old part of the store can be more grocery and less deli. So Gragg Lunsford can sell hardware. (”You need a nut or bolt now, you got to go all the way to Danville or the other way to the feed store in Moreland,” he says.)

And to remind that life just shouldn’t be so complicated.

And that nobody should care that there are towns that they — and the commonwealth of Kentucky — never heard of littering up the highway.

And that nobody should ever again ask where they can find a good Peckerwood.

It’s right here.