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Articles by Burt Kornegay
“The Intention of the Eye”
“Stop, Burt!” I braked. We were driving home one summer afternoon in 2023 when Becky spotted a box turtle crossing our driveway and called out. I thought the turtle was probably a male because, as I got out of the truck and walked up, it drew into its shell with a hiss then stared back at me with red eyes. Female box turtles don’t tend to react so warily, and their eyes are brown.
Up Moses Creek: The Pasture
Moses Creek may be off the beaten path, but it’s no stranger to famous people. Moses himself has knocked on our door, and so have Socrates and Plato, the Apostle Paul, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. Fellow American Robert Frost is another visitor, and I love to listen to him recite his poetry, though I’ve learned not to take him at face value. His poems often say one thing but mean something else.
Up Moses Creek: No Ode to Dejection
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: No Ode to Dejection A grave marker for a fallen Carolina wren of Moses Creek. On the title page of “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau sets the tone for his book with this pronouncement: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” “Chanticleer” is an old literary name for the rooster.
Up Moses Creek: No Lie
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: No Lie Wednesday, April 29, 2026 Henry Kornegay looks south over Caney Fork valley and the Cowee Mountains from the ridge behind Burt and Becky Kornegay’s house. 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.
Up Moses Creek: Spring Has Sprung!
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Spring Has Sprung! Wednesday, March 25, 2026 Brown marmorated stinkbugs, ‘Halyomorpha halys,’ are invasive insects from Asia. For the past dozen years here up Moses Creek, October has brought not only cool temperatures and colorful leaves but swarms of drone-like brown marmorated stinkbugs that try to get inside our house for the winter. I wrote about these invasive pests in the Nov.
Up Moses Creek: “I’m from Moses Creek”
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: “I’m from Moses Creek” Wednesday, January 14, 2026 We liked our Caney Fork house, pictured here in 1986, but in winter we called it Permafrost. 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.
Up Moses Creek: ‘Hit them hard!’
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: ‘Hit them hard!’ Wednesday, December 10, 2025 ‘And every piece I squarely hit / Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.’ Robert Frost. A man who lives up Caney Fork once told me he didn’t split red oak for firewood because its sap smelled like urine.
Up Moses Creek: Surf’s up!
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Surf’s up! Wednesday, November 12, 2025 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.
Up Moses Creek: A bumper crop
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: A bumper crop Tuesday, October 07, 2025 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.
Up Moses Creek: Head on a swivel!
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Head on a swivel! Tuesday, September 09, 2025 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. “Rattlesnake!” I heard her call. And not just any rattlesnake, but one we both took to be Cinnamon Bun, the name Becky had given our female yard rattler the summer before.
Up Moses Creek: Oil Change
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Oil Change 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.
Up Moses Creek: Kneel!
And once I saw lightning blow a large yellow poplar tree into bits. I decided to chance it and headed for my usual destination, a rock outcrop behind the house. I thought I’d get back down in time. And I might have, if I hadn’t stood there like the proverbial deer in the headlights transfixed by the next oncoming electrical storm. What I saw carried me back 15 years to when Becky and I were in a gallery in London looking at a painting by the 19th century English artist J.M.W. Turner.
Up Moses Creek: Earthquakes
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Earthquakes 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.
Up Moses Creek: Because it’s here
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, 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...
Up Moses Creek: The Last Trail
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: The Last Trail Wednesday, April 09, 2025 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. She’s on them daily. It’s the heavy labor to build them that is not her thing.
Up Moses Creek: ‘The sun is not so central as a man.’ - Henry Thoreau
Jan. 14: As I hiked up the slope of the ridge behind our house at dawn, my boots crunching in a crust of snow, I saw the moon setting toward the long dark ridgeline of Black Mountain, directly to my west. The moon’s face was round and silvery, set in a glowing pink sky. When I reached the top of our ridge, Black Mountain itself began to brighten, touched by the sun’s rays, though the sun itself was still hidden from view behind the Blue Ridge, to my east.
Trump’s mantra: let’s make a deal
To the Editor: In answer to a reporter’s question at Mar-a-Lago on February 18 about the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump said, as if he was speaking directly to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky: “You could have made a deal.” For three years now President Zelensky has been leading his country in an all-out struggle to preserve its freedom from dictator Vladimir Putin.
Up Moses Creek: Bones of Contention
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Bones of Contention Wednesday, February 12, 2025 Watching birds is a year-round pleasure for Becky and me — daily to see their beauty and vitality, their aerial acrobatics, their antics and doings that reveal their native smarts. And to make sure there are birds to watch we bait the yard. We have bird feeders outside the windows, plus several birdbaths and birdhouses here and there.
Up Moses Creek: ‘Blow wind like you’re never gonna blow again’
Nicholson grew up in Tuckasegee, and although he’s now an award-winning bluegrass musician who performs all over the place, including the Grand Ole Opry, he comes home each year for a Christmas hoedown of bluegrass, country, gospels and carols at the store. The music started at 11 a.m., and Becky went. But hunched over my books as usual in the mornings, I didn’t get there until the final set.
Up Moses Creek: Cinnamon Bun eats out
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Cinnamon Bun eats out Wednesday, December 11, 2024 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.
Up Moses Creek: A Head of Streaming Hair
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: A Head of Streaming Hair Wednesday, November 13, 2024 Just before sunset on Oct. 15, Becky and I left home for the Jackson County Airport, its runway laid on a flattened-off ridge near Cullowhee named Berry Mountain. We’d read that a comet christened Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was passing close to Earth, and we’d heard that the airport parking lot was a good place to see it.
Up Moses Creek: The Hatband
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: The Hatband Wednesday, October 09, 2024 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.
Up Moses Creek: Walking the log
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Walking the log Wednesday, September 11, 2024 I’d no sooner opened my book of Robert Frost’s poetry to start the morning right when Neighbor J drove up. A wind had downed trees in his pasture, and he was sawing one up when his chainsaw had gotten pinched — “Can you help me get it out?” A “pinch” happens when the tree trunk suddenly sags or shifts, clamping the saw bar tight in the kerf like gigantic wooden jaws.
‘Who can deny what we saw?’
The quiet competence and steadiness Biden has shown since 2020 in leading the nation out of the worst of the Pandemic is something I have been very thankful for, as well as for his passing legislation to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, and for his bolstering Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s murderous aggression.
Up Moses Creek: This is the world!
So it was one morning this summer when, canoe on my truck, I drove on down to that part of the world called the Lumber River, in eastern North Carolina. I went to make a river trip. It’s my fourth R of retirement and one thing Moses Creek lacks. Launching on the Lumber, I followed it through cypress swamps and mossy shade. I camped on the riverbank nights, bathed in the cool water, and, every morning, pushed off to the music of a thousand birds.
Up Moses Creek: 2 a.m.
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: 2 a.m. 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. I walked out with a flashlight but saw nothing lying in the yard. My light fell on our dog, Barnes. Seventeen years old and nearly deaf, he was curled up in his doghouse, asleep.
Up Moses Creek: ‘When, Wren?’
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. We first noticed something a-buildin’ there when the yard wrens started to fly in with pine needles, moss and leaves and shape them into a nest. The nest was inside a basin of Becky’s gardening tools on a shelf beside the door. Her trowel’s wood handle served as the entrance lintel. For the wrens it was a convenient spot, protected under the roof.
Up Moses Creek: Thinking Like an Empty
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: Thinking Like an Empty 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.
Up Moses Creek: A Siphon Does Not Sip
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: A Siphon Does Not Sip Wednesday, April 10, 2024 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. The plastic bulges out like a hernia from the pressure of the water in the pipe. Behind me, the pipe angles up to the pond, where it crosses the embankment, then turns back down and disappears into the water on the other side.
Up Moses Creek: The Window Strike
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: The Window Strike Wednesday, March 06, 2024 One day last December, a flock of robins descended on the loaded winterberry hollies in our yard, their red breasts making the clump look like it was hung with big Christmas tree ornaments. But when the hungry flock flew off later, the birds left the bushes bare of red breasts and red berries. Well ... except for a scattering of berries and one redbreast we call the Solitary Robin, a male.
Up Moses Creek: Coyote Howl
I couldn't see them, but they were close. Then I came on a white-tailed doe moving through the trees. She was heading in the same direction I was, up towards a dense growth of rhododendron on the ridgetop — and away from the howls. I wondered if she was one of the three does I often see on my morning hikes. They move so nimbly on the steep slopes that I call them the Three Graces. Where were the other two?
Up Moses Creek: I’ll Fly a Ways
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: I’ll Fly a Ways Wednesday, January 10, 2024 It takes something special to draw me out of Moses Creek — there’s so much here to see and do and write about. But on Dec. 16, maybe sensing the long nights of winter closing in, I got in my son Henry’s pickup and, driving down to where the valley opens up at NC 107, we turned up the Tuckasegee River, passed Aunt Sallie’s granite monument on the right, and made a left into Tuckasegee Trading Company.
Up Moses Creek: The Red Maple
Outdoors Columns Up Moses Creek: The Red Maple Wednesday, December 13, 2023 The air was still and frosty when I started up the trail that November morning to watch Black Mountain light up in the sun. Black Mountain forms the long dark ridgeline on the western side of our valley, opposite the side we live on. The mountain rises in four prominent knobs. From south to north they are Hooper, Middle, Parker and Black, each one rising higher than the one before.
Up Moses Creek: Yellow Jacket Muse P.S.
I wanted to use them as stepping stones for a walkway in the yard. Becky joined me, and, although flat rocks can be hard to find, by luck the first three we turned up were nature’s perfect pavers. It was like walking into a freshly plowed field and finding three fine arrowheads right off. Becky was in front scouting when I heard her say, “This one looks good,” and she tapped her foot on a gray surface showing through the fallen leaves.
Yellow Jacket Muse
Outdoors Columns Yellow Jacket Muse Wednesday, September 13, 2023 Before Becky and I retired up Moses Creek, I made my living as a backpack and canoe guide here in the Blue Ridge and in other parts of the country. My Slickrock Expeditions clients came mostly from the southeastern cities, and some of them — first-timers especially — arrived feeling nervous about the wilds.
Up Moses Creek: ‘It’s a Wild World’
The millipede was one of the big, black and gold “Carolina millipedes” that you occasionally see crawling along in the woods. If you pick it up — scaring it — you get a yellow liquid on your hands that smells like almonds. I’ve been told the liquid is organic cyanide and that millipedes make it to repel predators. But from what I saw on the ridge, the box turtle didn’t mind it. The turtle was standing in the middle of the trail and it had the millipede by the head.
Up Moses Creek: The creek runs blue and red
Knocking with his beak. You’d think he wants to be a woodpecker, the way he goes at it. But what he really wants is this: to be at the top of the bluebird pecking order in our yard. Ornithologists say that many female birds choose to mate in places where they can best raise their young. So to attract females, males vie with each other for the prime breeding spots.
Up Moses Creek: Snapper, Part II
Snapper’s usual breathing spot in our pond is next to a flat rock that juts out from the bank a few inches under water. Every 15 to 20 minutes the turtle swims out from under the rock, turns and clasps it with its front claws, then extends its neck slowly up toward the surface until just its head is out.
Up Moses Creek
Where Snapper comes from is a mystery. All we know is it doesn’t over-winter in the pond. For one thing, there’s no mud on the bottom for a “mud turtle” — to use an old name — to burrow in for the winter. When we built the pond, which is about the size of a swimming pool, we sealed its basin with a thick liner, and covered that with flat rocks.
Beauty and the beast
Birds were little more than nondescript flitting things to me that afternoon in January 1973, when I lay down on my bunk to sleep. It was on the second floor of a rundown WWII barracks at a Marine Corps airbase in southern California. I needed sleep because I worked nights in the base’s cavernous warehouse, Building 313, where my job was to find whatever parts the flightline mechanics needed to keep jet fighters and other military “birds” ready to bomb and strafe.
Up Moses Creek: Look up!
Hoping the crow-sized bird would swoop down in a flash of black, white and red feathers to fix itself to a tree, I Iooked up and found my eye drawn not to the bird but to a strange, silent, brilliant white light hung in the sky over Moses Creek.
Mole and Thrush and Pretty Polly
We could trap and kill the mole, but it’s been fun to watch instead as it burrows below the surface, making the ground heave and crack. Our binoculars bring it close. Besides, we’re not the only ones watching; a hermit thrush does too. It watches so avidly that wherever the mole goes, the bird is close behind. The two have been together so much we’ve named the pair Mole and Thrush. But Thrush does more than follow.
Up Moses Creek: Buck Fever
I’d also seen a video of a man who, quite sensibly I thought, perfumed himself with the scent of a doe in heat to see what would happen. What happened is that he got a severe pounding when a randy buck discovered the fragrant love of his life was a fake.
Up Moses Creek: Moses Creek goes global
Every bit of 5 feet thick and 150 feet tall, probably rooted there before 1492, the hemlock had dark, deeply furrowed bark protecting a trunk that rose higher than nearby trees into clear air, where its deep-green needles, gathered in a conical crown, took in the sun. Dismal Creek flowed past, its downhill rush contrasting with the tree’s still, upward, enduring stance on the mountain.
Up Moses Creek: Mr. Plume
That first spraying happened in 1960, and though I was just a boy, my memory of it is still sharp. I was hiking across a field looking for adventure when I heard my dog, Caesar, barking at something that looked like a small black-and-white cat with a fluffy tail. I ran over to pull him off the little creature, and that’s when I heard a slight hiss in the air. I’d had my nose in a lot of bad odors before then, and, being a boy, I enjoyed making them myself.
Up Moses Creek: Thrashers make a home on Berry Island
Not that brown thrashers are uncommon. There are about as many of them around as there are mockingbirds, and like mockingbirds, they loudly mimic the songs of other birds. But, fox-like, they are hard to see. A mockingbird will perch in full view on a lamppost to sing, but usually all I see of a thrasher is a brown blur shooting between thickets. Thrashers are bigger than mockingbirds too, with dark-streaked breasts, sharp, down-curving beaks, a very long tail, and piercing yellow eyes.
Up the creek: Where the heck is Moses Creek? Up Caney Fork!
During the height of the storm, however, the sky was dark and heavy as I walked down Moses Creek Road, with a downpour streaming off my hat. My destination was the bridge over Caney Fork, one of the principal creeks in Jackson County. Caney Fork comes to life on the southern flank of the Great Balsam Mountains, and if you have pulled into mile-high Caney Fork Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and taken in the vista stretching out for miles below, you’ve been there.
How To Sleep In Your Canoe
What makes the best bed on a canoe trip? Some say a thick pad in a tent. Others swear by a hammock, but I’ve canoe camped for years, and I sleep best in my canoe. Nothing beats pulling up on shore, laying a pad and sleeping bag in the boat, and crawling in. I can level and prop the canoe on any ground—be it sloped, rocky, or muddy. If it’s buggy, I drape mosquito net over the boat, if it’s rainy, I string up a tarp.
How To Sleep In Your Canoe
What makes the best bed on a canoe trip? Some will say a thick inflatable pad in a tent. Others swear by swinging a hammock, but I’ve canoe camped for many years, and tried it all. I sleep best in my canoe. Nothing beats pulling up on shore, laying a pad and sleeping bag in the bottom of my boat and crawling in. I can level and prop the canoe on any ground—be it sloped, rocky, or muddy. If it’s buggy, I drape mosquito netting over the boat. If it’s rainy, I string up a tarp. Cozy.
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