Up Moses Creek: Oil Change
You can make it!
Burt Kornegay photo
There’s a mountain world up Moses Creek, and I don’t love to leave it. Outdoors, steep wild ridgelines form the horizon, with deep forests, clean air and clear streams tumbling down the slopes. Close to the house are Becky’s beds of flowers, all a-flutter with butterflies, birds and bees.
There’s a small pond we cool off in when summer days are hot. Indoors, there’s a woodstove for when winter days are not — along with books to read and spring water in the tap.
So how could I forget Aug. 13, 2019, when the little red wrench on the dash of my Ridgeline lit up? Like a monkey wrench thrown into the works, it told me it was time to service the truck. That meant a trip to the nearest dealership, Apple Tree Honda. It’s on Underwood Road in Fletcher, far away.
Now, “Underwood” might conjure up the image of a shady byway, and “Apple Tree” may bring to mind the orchards that were farmed around Fletcher once, but when I turned into Honda’s new white superstore, the only apple tree in view was a stylized painting of one over the entrance to the used-car part of the complex, with three glossy red apples dangling from it. Otherwise, shopping centers, offices, gas stations, motels, apartments and restaurants dominated the land as far as I could see, bounded by I-26 and the Asheville Airport.
Told the wait time was two hours, I decided to eat breakfast at Cracker Barrel. It’s about a 10-minute walk away. But because sidewalks were a low priority during the recent building frenzy, to “walk” there meant balancing on curbs as traffic blew past and weaving through busy parking lots.
Midway I came to Airport Road, its many lanes bursting at the seams with traffic. For pedestrians — and I appeared to be it that morning — there was a crosswalk light. I pressed the button, and, after the traffic lights turned red, the small white image of a walker lit up on the far side of the highway. He was striding forward, as if to say, “You can make it!” I’d no sooner stepped off the curb, however, than I saw walker white switch to a flashing red palm warning me I had 22 seconds — and counting down. As I crossed the paved expanse between walls of braked traffic, I sensed that inside every vehicle there were eyes fixed not on me but on the red lights overhead, and a foot was poised above a gas pedal, and both eyes and feet were wired together in a brain set to go on green.
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Cracker Barrel was almost in sight when I came to two helmeted construction workers sitting in the shade of a maple tree looking at their phones. Beyond them a bulldozer, a dirt-compactor and a front-end loader were noisily flattening an orchard-sized dirt pad. And nearest to the men there was a big yellow trackhoe at work. It was the trackhoe that caught my eye.
The machine looked like a cross between a praying mantis and a Tyrannosaurus rex. Mantis-like, it had a rigid exoskeleton powered by an inner hydraulic life, and when it uncurled its jointed arm from the “prayer position,” it looked like a mantis about to grasp its prey. But its arm did not end in the spiny, clasping foreleg of a mantis. Instead, it was attached to a boxy reptilian head with a mouth full of big teeth. The upper jaw was large and cavernous, the lower one shovel-like — like a T Rex. It was a TyrannoHoe.
Opening wide, the T-Hoe clamped its jaws around a sawed-off tree stump and started wrenching it back and forth in its hole. I heard the machine rev up, saw it tense, then watched as it ripped the stump out of the ground. Wads of clay were clinging to the roots. The T-Hoe shook the stump violently, making the dirt fly — just the way a dog shakes a rabbit it’s caught to make sure it is dead. It lifted the stump high, dropped it, picked it back up, shook it, dropped it again. Then, proud predator, it carried the naked thing to a truck piled high with other stumps, their roots dangling like skeletal limbs.
Breakfast over, I was sitting in one of Cracker Barrel’s rocking chairs out front letting my meal settle before the walk back to Apple Tree when a gun-metal gray pickup with a loud diesel rattle pulled into a handicapped parking spot in front of the restaurant entrance. It had “XLT F250” and “6.7L POWER STROKE” in shiny chrome on its body. “4X4” was painted large across its side panel. The 4's were black, the X blood red. Stamped in recessed caps on the hood was SUPER DUTY. And below that, centered on the truck’s bulldog snout, “Ford” gleamed in cursive silver on a royal-blue oval shield.
The truck’s doors opened, and three men and a woman got out. They had to use the running boards to reach the ground. With their round faces and stocky builds, I thought they’d have fit in with the revelers in Bruegel’s painting “The Peasant Dance.” The four didn’t dance, but they did stretch, as if they’d been on the road for a while. Then they walked into the restaurant.
That’s when I realized they’d left the truck running. Poised on its aggressive tires, the truck seemed to be growling to other vehicles that ventured close, “Stand back.” To look at it, you’d think that any being who emerged from such an impressive carriage, drawn by hundreds of horses, would have to be impressive, too, a sun-like deus ex machina, and not everyday people in casual modern dress. But I could also see how such a machine would bestow a feeling of power on anyone who rode inside — super power, with a touch of class.
I was still in my rocking chair when the four came back out. The woman got in the cab, while the men stood around smoking. The truck was smoking, too. Then the woman got out complaining that the air conditioner was pulling in their fumes, so the men walked off a few steps. The woman reached back into the cab and lifted out a poodle the same gray color as the truck. Its fur was styled, and it was dolled up with a pink harness studded with sequins. It had a pink leash. The two walked over to a grass median, where the dog squatted. Then they got back in the truck.
The men followed, each taking one last pull before flicking his butt away. As he hoisted himself up, the driver gave me a long look.
The truck backed out, breathing deeply now, ready for highway combat. When it shouldered its way out of the lot, I saw a pile of luggage in the bed. And it had a pink suitcase on top — the poodle’s, probably. The blue Ford oval on the tailgate flashed in the sun.
Walking back to Apple Tree, I came to the same two workers at the construction site. They were still sitting in the shade with their phones. But now they were in different shade, under a different tree. All that was left of the first tree they had been under was a gaping red clay hole! The men had moved over to the shade of the last tree standing.
Then I saw the T-Hoe behind them. It was bent over something, worrying it, making sure it was dead.
I asked the men what was going to be built. One said a motel. There’s already a Courtyard, a Clarion, a Fairfield, a Hampton, a Comfort, a Wingate, a Holiday and a Budget, I thought, looking around. “What kind of motel is it going be?” He shrugged, said he didn't know, he just moved dirt. Nodding toward a steel frame going up in the distance, the other man said with hunger in his voice that he wished it was finished. Popeyes was on the rise.
Back at Airport Road, with traffic surging past, I pushed the crosswalk button. I had 22 seconds.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County. “Up Moses Creek” comes out the second week of each month.)
