Up Moses Creek: Earthquakes
A male woodthrush fills the woods with song. Fred Coyle photo
I was walking back into the house when Becky met me at the door, excited: “I think we just had an earthquake! Did you feel it?” She’d heard a low roar, she said, and then a closet door beside her rattled, as if something inside wanted out. “It went on for maybe 20 seconds.” This was on May 10, at 9:04 a.m., to be exact. And all I could say was “What?”
At 9:03, or thereabouts, a wood thrush had flown into a window with a bang, and, picking up a shoebox we keep for such occasions, I’d gone out to where it lay in the grass. Sometimes a stunned bird needs no more than to be placed in a safe, quiet, dark place for a little while to regain its senses. As near as I can figure it, at the same moment Becky heard the roar and rattle, the whole wide world had contracted for me to the wild bird in my hands.
Then a news report confirmed it. The quake had registered 4.1 on the Richter scale. Its epicenter was 40 miles south of Knoxville. It had started 15 miles underground. There’d been no reports of damage. But faster than a speeding bulletin — coinciding, in fact, with Becky’s look and words — the memory of the first earthquake I’d ever experienced came back to me like a 30-year aftershock. There’d been no breaking news, either, to explain it away, because I was deep in the Citico Creek Wilderness in Tennessee.
Citico Creek Wilderness borders our Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness in the Unicoi Mountains, on the Tennessee side of the state line, and together they make up one of the largest national forest wilderness areas in the east. I was guiding a private school group there on a backpacking trip. We were camped beside a quiet pool in the creek, our fifth morning out. It was July 5, 1995. Breakfast was over, and I was talking quietly with the others about the area’s Cherokee past when there came a roar from the upper end of the creek’s headwaters.
“Sonic boom?” I thought. “Flash flood coming?” — which was nonsensical since there’d been no rain.
The sound had the deep quality of thunder but none of thunder’s toss and tumble. Instead, a sustained and increasing roar came rushing down the creek toward us. It washed over us like a drawn-out wave, filling the valley with sound. Then our camp began to vibrate. I felt my pant legs vibrating too, and the quiet pool beside us was all a-quiver. Its rock basin had been rocked.
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I glanced at one of the teachers. “Earthquake!” he said. He’d felt them out west.
In the mid-1970s, when I worked on a carpentry crew in eastern North Carolina re-roofing and siding farmhouses, a fellow worker called Big Belly would wave us to one side after lunch, saying, “Boys, git outen the way ‘twixt me and them bushes, cause my bowels they are a-rumblin!” He had to sign his paychecks with an X, but he had earthy poetry in him. Down the ladder and across the yard he’d go. Now, deep down at our campsite beside Citico Creek, surrounded by mountains amplifying the sound, Earth’s belly rumbled, but there was nowhere for us to “git.”
What a jolt it is to be standing on “terra firma,” the Mother Earth you’ve known all your life, and then in an instant to find an infirm mother underfoot! “Earth shaking” is from the ground up. We’d been planning to make Indian gourd rattles that morning to shake around the final night’s campfire festivities when a resounding blow from deep below turned the valley into a reverberating drum.
Then the tremors began to subside. Or rather, they followed the departing roar-wave down Citico Creek. Water and air and camp and my pant legs eased back to reassuring sight, sound and feel.
Then came the logical questions. Had we been close to the epicenter of a mild earthquake? Or were we on the periphery of a magnitude 7 or more? Was Atlanta or Asheville or Knoxville tumbling down? Or even — it suddenly occurred to me — Cullowhee? Anxiety swept over me with that thought. I imagined Becky and Henry lying in the rubble of our collapsed house. I had to tamp down the urge to claw my way out of the woods to find someone, anyone who could assure me that my fears were but a heartquake.
We decided that if the earthquake had been destructive, we’d see aircraft passing overhead. But the sky stayed quiet and blue.
When I returned home from the Citico Creek trip, Becky gave me an article she’d saved from the July 6 issue of the Asheville Citizen Times, 1995: “Earthquake shakes southwestern N.C.” It had registered 3.7. And based on a red bull’s-eye that showed the epicenter on a map, our camp had been centered right on top of it.
“So, that’s what 3.7 feels like,” I was thinking as I read, when the shoebox rattled me back to May 10, 2025. I was sanding in the house with Becky and a wood thrush that wanted out.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the second week of each month.)
