I've lived within 20 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway most of my adult life. But until last spring, when I began work on a series of essays for a coffee table book that photographer Scott Graham is publishing on the parkway, I hadn't thought about it in any sustained or concentrated way. I've spent a lot of time on the parkway between Boone and Asheville over the years; this writing project forced me further afield. I write this in mid-October, after a three-day trip to Rocky Knob (milepost 167- 169), where I spent two nights and on exhilarating day hiking nearly 14 miles. I'd passed Rocky Knob/ Rock Castle Gorge on previous trips, but never had time to more than gawk at the view and dream of exploring the gorge. I doubt I'd ever have acted on that dream, had I not spent a night at Rocky Knob on my return from a trip up the parkway in mid-September.
Though I write for a magazine that extols travel and exploring "the mountains of the South," my explorations are circumscribed because I'm a miserable traveler myself: a homebody, used to sleeping in a place that's very quiet and very dark, who likes eating her own food . I'm no camper; B&Bs make me claustrophobic. Motels - landscaped with sodium vapor lights, located beside highways traveled by insomniacs driving 18-wheelers - are never dark or quiet enough for sleep (though perfect for dark nights of the soul). I'm always looking for a place that feels like home – something I despaired of finding 'til I stumbled on the housekeeping cabins at Rocky Knob.
The cabins are a Blue Ridge Parkway anomaly - one of landscape architect Stan Abbott's visions for the pleasure road he was assigned to bring into being. Constructed in 1941 with a special Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) appropriation, they were to serve as prototype for a series of trail lodge complexes Abbott hoped to replicate elsewhere on the parkway. "As we visualize it," he wrote, the trail lodges "will serve a purpose differing from that of any recreational facility so far developed in the National Park System." Scout troops, youth hostels and hiking clubs could use them as "rough-it" camps. The Park Service "will provide built-in bunks, toilets, showers, benches, picnic type table, and fireplace. We might provide straw with which to fill the ordinary type of bed tick, and we will maintain a pile of uncut dead timber, but the wood necessary for cooking and hot water in the showers must be cut by camp occupants."
Abbott's dream of a series of camps - perhaps within hiking distance of one another - was never realized. No others were ever built. Indeed, the cabins at Rocky Knob were never used in the way he envisioned. By 1950, they'd been remodeled as family housekeeping units. Fifteen years later, a new Rocky Knob master plan described them as "beyond repair" and recommended razing them. Fortunately, they were re habilitated instead. The cabins are off by themselves, a mile from the parkway, in a little clearing studded with apple trees. The seven original structures - five cabins containing a total of seven units, a wash house with shower and toilet facilities, and a building housing the manager's quarters and office – and an old cabin with a sagging shake-shingled roof, are all that's there.
The minute I walked through the door of a Rocky Knob housekeeping cabin, I fell instantly in love. You don't have to stuff your bed tick or cut your own firewood anymore, but the furnishings are fairly spartan, judged by today's "all the amenities" standards. In the sleeping area, the simple iron bedsteads are made up with hand-stitched quilts, their colors faded and soft. The kitchen/ living area has a two-eye range, small refrigerator, sink with cold running water, dishes, utensils, pots, pans, chairs and tables. No bathrooms (except in the handicap-accessible unit, which has a shower and hot and cold water).
The September night of my first stay, I arrived travel-weary, and sat outside until dark. It was mid-week; I was the only guest in residence. Within five minutes, a migrating monarch popped up out of the trees and flew directly overhead. In the next hour, 27 more followed, on exactly the same southwesterly trajectory. Four nighthawks and several dragonflies, also migrating, flew over. I watched crows harass a hawk.
When the show was over, I went inside, fried potatoes, peppers and onions from home in a cast iron skillet, and sliced up a tomato. I set the tea pot on, boiled water to wash the dishes, went to bed early and slept well. In the morning, I made a list of what to bring next time - and stopped at the office to reserve one of the two cabins with a fireplace for early October.
Spaghetti topped my "most wanted" list; l made the sauce with end-of-season tomatoes, peppers, basil and oregano the weekend before I left. I filled an empty sunflower seed bag with kindling, packed the car with everything I thought I might want or need and set off in a drizzle: Though the sky spat rain most of the way north, I was elated. If this weather persisted, I would stay in my cabin, cook comfort food, tend the fire, think about Stan Abbott and the parkway, and write. If it cleared, I would do those things - and hike.
I settled in, laid a fire, cooked dinner, walked to the wash house to shower, and looked up to see a million stars. A clear sky and brisk breeze greeted me the next morning. By 8:30 a.m ., I'd eaten my oatmeal, packed apples and two sandwiches, and set out. I hiked down an old fire road a mile or two to access the 11-mile loop trail around Rock Castle Gorge. I wasn't sure, having pretty much confined my exercise to gardening and a three-mile daily stroll with the dogs, that I was capable of hiking 14 miles, and was a little worried I'd run out of daylight. But I wanted to get to know the gorge as intimately as I could in a day's time, and knew I'd be disappointed in myself if I didn't try. So I started off at a brisk pace and stayed on the schedule I'd set myself until I could see I'd have daylight to spare. Then I relaxed a little. I paused at the site of the CCC camp, and thought about how weary those boys must have been at the end of each working day. Maybe four miles from the end of my hike, I ran in to a flock of wild turkeys that flew across the creek rather than share the trail with me. Beyond the creek the gorge rose in a near-vertical wall. Defying gravity, they flowed up it like a dark and iridescent stream. By that point in the day, I'd developed a pretty fair appreciation of the amount of energy that required, and on the spot acquired a new respect for turkeys.
I must admit that for the last couple miles, an image of the bed in my cabin lodged in my brain, persistent as a horsefly, despite concerted attempts to bat it away. At last I rounded a bend that did not reveal yet another long stretch of leaf-covered fire road. In front of me was the gate I'd walked around seven hours earlier. At the cabin, the bed looked just the way I'd imagined - and felt better. After a while, I got up, put on the teakettle, lit the fire, and headed to the wash house for a shower. Back in the cabin, the fire glowed. My muscles ached, but who cared? Suffused by a sense of well-being, I ate leftover spaghetti, washed the dishes, doused the lights, and settled down in front of the fire. I don't know that, even in my own house, or up in Vermont beside my mother's soapstone stove, I've ever felt more at home.
I got to thinking about my old hero Thoreau, that great advocate of spending a minimum of four hours a day sauntering - how he must have sat in his cabin at Walden (a third the size of this one) feeding his fire. Somewhere in the shadows behind me, I sensed his presence. I thought of Stan Abbott "lone-wolfing it" down this way on his first reconnoitering trip in January 1934 - sent by his bosses in Washington to "get to know the mountains." I thought of the dreams he'd spun - the way a spiderling plays thread out onto a breeze to sail away on - and of how I was sitting at that moment within the very real shelter of one of those dreams, comfortable warm and content. And he was there with me too. I remembered Sam Weems, in charge of land acquisition before he succeeded Abbott as the parkway's second superintendent, who'd pushed the powers that be into acquiring far more land at Rocky Knob than the 500-600 acres originally called for. The land in this clearing. The land I'd climbed up, sauntered across, picked my way carefully down, and trudged over, back to my cabin. Weems was proud of the fact that he never had to resort to condemnation in all the land he acquired for all our sakes, and I liked him for that. As the wood popped and light danced over the cabin 's dark, unpainted walls, he joined us in the companionable silence.
The next morning, before I started home, I drove to the campground I'd hiked past the day before, up to a knoll in the RV area. I wanted to see the grove of Chinese chestnut trees that Stan Abbott had had the CCC boys plant back in 1940. His idea was to distribute the seed these trees produced to farmers up and d own the parkway, so they could establish chestnut orchards of their own - in part to make up for the loss of the American chestnut to blight. It was a long-term dream, not destined to take place in his time. Like the string of "rough-it" camps, the chestnut orchards the first grove was meant to spawn never materialized - though not because the trees never bore fruit. The spiny husks, splitting open to reveal smooth , dark, slightly downy nuts, were everywhere that morning - littering the grass beneath the trees, crushed on the asphalt. Gingerly, I picked one up to take with me. My little homestead is only 20 miles from the parkway, and sweet dreams like rough-it cabins and chestnut orchards deserve to stay alive.