A female timber rattler lived inside an old railroad tie beside our back porch last summer, coming out in the afternoons to lie on the steps in the sun. Curled up like that, the snake showed swirls of light brown, with dark-toasted bands, and her scales gave off a sugary glaze, so Becky named her Cinnamon Bun.

I was on the ridge this morning admiring the autumn-red leaves of a gum tree, lit up by the rising sun, when a titmouse landed and, fixing his black eye on me, shouted a word in Bird I know — “Snake!” He shouted it so loud you could have heard him down in the yard. And every time he shouted it, he turned first one way on the branch, then the other. And with every turn, he fixed the eye on that side of his head on me. 

Like some mountain man who’s happy in his holler, I’m happy to live up Moses Creek. It’s the right place to read, write and ramble in the woods around our house — the 3Rs of retirement for me. But sometimes, days having passed, and wondering how the water flows, I’ll drive down the creek to the Tuckasegee River, where the valley opens up and traffic rushes past, and looking around, I’ll think, “So, this is the world!” 

A sudden, loud crack came through the open bedroom window, startling me out of sleep — “What was THAT?” Then came a cascade of pops and snaps that told me a tree was falling, a big tree, to judge by how long the noise lasted. Some tall wooden thing weighing many tons had just crashed. 

Finally, we can go out the back door again. For a month we made a front door detour around an unplanned construction project on the back porch. 

I was at Lazy Hiker brewpub in Sylva enjoying a meal with Moses Creek friends and talking about the neighborhood trash pick-up that was planned for the morrow — part of Jackson County’s “Cleaning Up the Mountains” campaign — when one of them mentioned another person who lives up the creek and predicted that we’d see his Michelob Ultra empties along the road. My friend had picked up after him more than once. 

Ready?” I shout over my shoulder up towards the pond. I am straddling the end of a long, white plastic pipe filled with water, its end taped shut with a wrap of 5-mil plastic.

I was hiking in the woods above our house at sunrise when coyotes began to howl behind me, and they howled and howled.

It takes something special to draw me out of Moses Creek — there’s so much here to see and do and write about.

The air was still and frosty when I started up the trail that November morning to watch Black Mountain light up in the sun.