Up Moses Creek: No Lie
Henry Kornegay looks south over Caney Fork valley and the Cowee Mountains from the ridge behind Burt and Becky Kornegay’s house.
Burt Kornegay photo
One of the questions the doctor always asks when I go for my annual Medicare Wellness checkup is, “Have you been falling recently?” — to which I always answer, “No.” And technically that’s not a lie.
The “no” would have been true through and through in my younger years. I could walk a skinny branch in a gale. But now, a decade into Medicare, my balance has become “a diminished thing,” to borrow from Robert Frost, and I do fall from time to time.
But the way I figure it, the doctor’s question is about falling in life’s usual places — in houses, stores and other buildings, on sidewalks, in parking lots and yards. We live on surfaces that are flattened and smoothed for the human foot.
But that’s not where I take my tumbles. Rather, they happen on the ridge behind our house. I hike daily there, make trails, and enjoy the life of the forest. But the ridge is also a place where Mother Nature shapes the surfaces, and she likes them steep, rocky and tangled with roots and vines. “You fall in crazy places,” is the way Becky puts it. So I tell my doctor, “No.”
But a crazy fall I took last month did call for a doctor.
I was rebuilding a trail that angles up a steep slope just below the ridge top, and I fell backward off the locust log “cribbing” that holds the trail in place like a low retaining wall. I had a mattock, and when I stepped back to swing it, I just kept on going. I remember trying to chop the mattock into the cribbing to stop my fall — too late! Then, searing pain shot through my back, and I almost passed out. As chance would have it, an arm-thick locust branch lay on the ground about five feet below the trail. The branch was bent in the shape of an elbow, with the point cocked up, and that’s where I landed.
Related Items
Partner content: Taste of Local
Rehab of Bullhead Trail to LeConte continues
Pisgah Conservancy expands Helene recovery efforts
Harris to provide free sports physicals
Becky had been right earlier when, after reassuring her that I move slowly when working on the ridge, she remarked: “You move slow all right, until you fall. Then you’re fast.”
I rolled off the branch with a groan and lay face down in the leaves, breathing hard. After some minutes, I reached back with my hand to see if there was blood, but it came away clean. I’d been elbowed, not stabbed. If I could make it back up to the trail, I thought, maybe I could shake things off and get back to work. But when I tried to draw my feet under me, it stoked the pain. I began to fear that I’d broken something and that trying to stand would make the injury worse. Not helping, the slope was icy slick with dry oak leaves.
Unable to go back up, I looked down. The trees had not yet leafed, and I could just make out the roof of our house, far below. Becky was there with her friends. It was her turn to host the Caney Fork card group in their weekly game of Hand and Foot. I couldn’t shout loud enough to tell her I’d been dealt a hand of “Elbow and Back.” And I didn’t have a phone.
Turning over gingerly, with my feet stuck out in front of me, I started sliding down through the leaves on my butt, homeward bound. I did have help in this from “The Big Fellow,” my name for gravity. It’s true that gravity had taken advantage of my carelessness to yank me backward off the trail. But now, damage done, he lent me a downhill hand. I’d slide for a few feet then stop to let the pain subside.
My immediate goal was the tractor path at the slope’s base. It was wide and pretty level, and it led on down to the yard. Once I reached the path, I held onto a tree and slowly stood. I tried a baby step, then another, and then crept along the path.
When I left the house earlier that afternoon, the card ladies had settling down to play. I was dressed in work clothes and boots, and as I headed out the door, I waved a hearty goodbye to them. But now I had barely crossed the threshold back into the house, unable to stand up straight, before I heard a chorus of, “Are you okay?”
An hour later I was with Becky in examination room No. 8 at Harris Regional Hospital, where I’d been eased onto a bed. After wrapping a blood-pressure cuff on one of my arms, a nurse inserted an IV needle in the other and asked if I wanted something for the pain. I decided to tough it out and told her no. It served me right for being careless on the ridge. But after waiting a long while for a doctor, I pushed the call bell button to tell the nurse I’d changed my mind.
The morphine worked so fast it felt like the nurse had waved a magic wand over my back. That must be why the drug is named after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep. It puts pain to bed.
A CAT scan followed the morphine, and finally, after another wait, a second doctor came in and told me the result. To make sure I understood, I boiled his diagnosis down: “No bones broken, no internal bleeding, right?” He nodded yes. The relief on hearing that was as salutary as Morpheus himself. I relaxed, began to feel like I was back in the saddle again. Driving me home late that evening, Becky pulled into Domino’s to pick up a pizza.
The next afternoon, I followed in reverse my baby-step route of the day before on the tractor path. My back was sore and would stay sore for a month, but there was trail work to be done. I’d let pain be my guide. When I reached the base of the steep slope, I saw coming down through the woods the long dark skid mark my butt had made in the leaves.
To Becky go the parting words, which she wrote of this story: “Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be. Yeah, right.”
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)
