It was 40 years ago this month that I first heard the name of the small creek in Jackson County that would eventually become our home, Moses Creek. Becky and I had been renting a house in Cullowhee in 1984 from a landlady who kept threatening to up the rent on us, even though we’d told her at the get-go that we, newlyweds from eastern North Carolina, had no more ”up” to give. But a year in, after still another monthly phone call from her, I turned to Becky and said, “Let’s see if there’s something we can afford to buy.” 

A man who lives up Caney Fork once told me he didn’t split red oak for firewood because its sap smelled like urine. He called it “piss oak.” His remark came back to me one day in September while I stood in my woodlot filling my lungs with the odor from a ton of freshly bucked-up red oak waiting to be split, and all I can say is that one man’s stench is another’s sweet aroma. 

Every fall, Becky and I leave Moses Creek for a week to go to Isle of Palms in South Carolina, and we stay on the beach there in a complex called the Sea Cabins. I make sure that two canoes go with us, a tandem we use to explore the quiet inland waterways together, and, for ocean surfing, a small solo canoe that I paddle here on our mountain rivers. We also rent bikes, and we walk the beach. 

One of the earliest signs of fall comes in late August, when dogwood and black gum leaves, green since spring, begin to show the salmon and maroon colors they are soon to be, and when Virginia creeper vines, hidden in the canopy all summer, suddenly redden, revealing their upward windings through the tallest trees. But the surest sign of fall for me lies not overhead but underfoot, in the form of acorns lying on our trails. 

It was the yard birds that alerted Becky, “a crowd of them,” as she put it; chickadees, titmice and wrens all scolding their heads off at something under the fringe tree. And when she looked out the back door, there the thing was.

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.

Thunderstorms were crossing the mountains in waves one morning in the spring, and while trying to get in my morning hike up the ridge after one passed, I got caught in the next. I knew the danger. Lightning strikes around 300 people a year in the United States, injuring most, killing one out of 10.

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?” 

When April rains fall on Moses Creek and wake the dormant winter roots, and when the warm sun, following, fills the woods with wildflowers, bird songs and budding leaves, and suddenly the whole valley is on its way to spring’s green apogee, then travelers from North Carolina and other states fly to Kathmandu, Nepal, where, breathing oxygen from tanks on their backs, and with their minds partly crazed with cold, they try to climb Mount Everest, the world’s tallest peak, “Because it’s there.” For mountain climbers, our spring coincides with the best of Everest’s bad seasons to attempt its frozen summit. 

When I told Becky on New Year’s Day that this was going to be my last trail, she laughed, “You said that three trails back.” She was thinking of the Spring Creek, Sourwood, Open Woods, Deer Point and other trails I’ve built over the years in the woods around our house. Becky likes walking the trails as much as I do.