Up Moses Creek: “I’m from Moses Creek”
We liked our Caney Fork house, pictured here in 1986, but in winter we called it Permafrost.
Burt Kornegay photo
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.”
So, we asked Cullowhee realtor Lucretia Bassett to help us. Taking a look at our finances, she said, “It might take a while.” And “a while” is what it took for her to show us several small run-down houses clinging for dear life to steep slopes. Then Lucretia remembered one more possibility in our financial range. It was on Caney Fork. We were drawn to it the moment we pulled up.
True, the house was another little fixer-upper, “RUSTIC INSIDE AND OUT” as a realty ad put it. But we were a rustic-leaning, fixer-upper couple, and this house sat on an old farmhouse site at the base of Shelton Mountain. Lucretia said the owners had moved to Charlotte and the house had been on the market for over a year. They’d dropped the price to $38,000. After learning that we qualified for a FHA “First Time Home Buyer Loan,” which, in the mid-1980s came with the unusually low interest rate of 9.5%, we offered the owners less. They said yes. We moved in and never looked back.
But we did look around. Up the road from us was an old house no bigger than ours, and we’d heard that it was the home of a widow named Zennie Coward. She was said to have raised ten children there. So, while taking a walk one January morning, I decided to introduce myself.
Zennie came out to my knock. She was a slender woman in her 80s. We said hello, and, after an awkward moment, I asked her if she was from around here. Of course, I thought I already knew the answer to that. Her maiden name, I’d been told, was Stephens. That made her a descendant of one of the pioneer families in the area. And across the valley from us, lit up by the sun, stood Coward Knob, named after her husband’s family. Zennie was “from around here” as much as a person can be. My asking was just a way to break the January ice.
Zennie surprised me. “No,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, “I’m not from around here.” Then, pointing across the valley and to the left of Coward Knob, where a small tributary joined Caney Fork, she said, “I’m from Moses Creek.”
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Now, to me, the little valley Zennie pointed out and named looked so close I could almost touch it. It was only a mile away. But to Zennie that mile was a significant distance. It separated Moses Creek, where she’d been born and raised, from Caney Fork valley, where in 1920 she’d moved to start a new life as a married woman of 17. The way she said it, she had traveled far.
I’d been reading in Horace Kephart’s “Our Southern Highlanders” about what he called the “isolation” of people living in the Appalachian hollers. It was a time and place where, as an old saying goes, “the ridgeline is your world.” And beyond that ridgeline stood other tall, steep, sharp-edged ridges as far as the eye could see — the Great Smokies, Snowbirds, Cowees, Balsams and other ranges butting against each other, thwarting easy passage. There were no long, wide through-valleys, like Virginia’s Shenandoah, and no big navigable rivers. Men left home mainly to hunt and to drive livestock on dirt tracks called turnpikes down to the flat lands to be sold. As for the women, Kephart quotes another observer of mountain life “they are almost as rooted as the trees.” Kephart himself knew several women who’d never ventured more than a few miles from their cabin doors.
Now, there stood Zennie Stephens Coward at her door pointing across Caney Fork valley as if toward Timbuktu: “I’m from Moses Creek.”
Our decision to buy the Caney Fork house marked the start of maturing growth for Becky and me. I started and grew my guiding business, Slickrock Expeditions, running it out of the house. And as the business grew, we expanded the house to accommodate it. Becky’s work and responsibilities as a librarian at Western Carolina University also grew. Then she grew in another way, with Henry. Then Henry grew from an acorn to an oak. And during these prime years for us, Zennie died, at 91. A few years later, her house burned down.
It took many winters of sunlight deprivation for Zennie’s “Moses Creek” to become more than just a name to us. We liked our house, but it was on a north slope. Shelton Mountain stood behind it, and the sun that peeked briefly over its shoulder in winter came in at a slant. We began to refer to our place as “Permafrost.” We’d look across the valley from nearly perpetual winter shade and see south-facing Coward Knob and Moses Creek warmed all day by golden light.
When I saw a sign posting land for sale up Moses Creek in 2001, we bought. And with teenage Henry helping, we built a new house there. Zennie Coward had moved from Moses Creek to Caney Fork for marriage. We went the other way for sun.
On New Year’s Day this January, now in our “golden years,” we hiked to the top of Coward Knob and sat on the warm rocks facing south. A hawk flew past in the blue sky. Far down in the valley, Caney Fork was flashing light. The mountains all around basked in the sun. But on the opposite side of the valley, our old house lay in deep shade. We could barely make it out. I thought about what Zennie had told me 40 years earlier. She knew the length of a mountain mile.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)
