Rocky Knob Agos
Short takes » A Doppelganger Emerges from the Mists of Time and Memory
I have just learned today there are two Rocky Knob picnic areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Southern Virginia. And they are miles apart. Two.
Damn.
One is closer to the North Carolina State line. One is closer to the City of Staunton, Virginia. Which may clarify a little of my family history soon.
This is…troublesome. In what I think is about to become a very good way. It just may be the key to what has been an indecipherable cog in the machine of family history.
For it could explain both the confusion of geology I see when reviewing images from 2019, 2022 and 2023. It screams like a livid banshee on the road bathed in the moonlight before the instance of discovery, of a long stay in two short spaces, just to see how these places came to be both part of, and apart from, each other. They are both a very visceral part of the haunted lands of the Parkways. This Rocky Knob (above) which I’ll now call Rocky Knob picnic area V.01, and the one I have been to all too briefly, as the newly discovered Rocky Knob V.02. I may have passed it by as a site to photograph just solely for lack of knowing what it may represent, and the pressing need at that time to make my way North.
But not again.
This time, in October, I’ll be drilling down more.
The “Rocky Knob Agos” photo above was shot in late August 2019. It is also the same site of one very cold night spent four years later, spending that night in this same parking space shown in the foreground of this image from 9pm October 12th, 2023 till 5:30am the next morning, Friday the 13th. Later that day I lost my iPhone about 65 miles up the Parkway, and the 7900 photographs I’d recorded without backup, for I was off grid for somewhere between ten and eleven days, save for one stop at the Asheville Blue Ridge Parkway Tru Hotel. I was trying to recoup for 20 hours and do some journaling at a desk from 7am to 11am the next morning.
What I did not do, was back up my photos. I was too tired to think straight, and fell asleep after taking a shower on entering the room.
I was exhausted that next day still. I had been sleeping in my Jeep on the Parkway as much as possible for the previous week and a half to grant me the longest of number of hours shooting in daylight, as opposed to pitching a tent, making and breaking camp, which burns up a lot of daylight I felt I could not afford. For I wanted Fall color, and Nature was being miserly of that resource. I had considered returning to Knoxville that night, but decided by checkout time in the morning to drive back up to the Doughton Park area, and follow it to the closure at the Brinegar Cabin site. Much of the lower section of the Parkway was riddled with such closures that season due to scheduled road maintenance. I would then wind my way back east to 1-77, drive up to Virginia to access the Parkways again at Fancy Gap.
The plan by then was to head North for the last 160 miles as I had received an email while at the hotel, sent by a person near Meadows of Dan that the leaves had suddenly burst into color up there. Color was dropping at Fancy Gap, so I slowed my pace and shot all along the way, including some side trips off the overpasses to Highways 52 and 58, stopping frequently. I then began a reshoot around Mayberry General Store, then Meadows of Dan, and a few hours more at Mabry Mill until after Sundown for a second season of shots from when I was there in August 2019. All was well. I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at a Meadows of Dan cafe but didn’t sign onto the internet.
The next morning, having survived a 28º night at Rocky Knob picnic grounds, I checked my phone, saw the Friday 13th date, winced, then looked at my Blue Ridge Parkway supplied map. I was only 90 miles from Peaks of Otter Lodge. It was at that moment I decided to stay at the Lodge that night, upload my photos as they have great wifi, and rest again. I’d then go the extra 80 miles North to the upper Milepost 0 of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Sun awoke and I made some shots again of what you see above in early morning light, but with October’s colors. It was a good plan, and it had just started coming together.
”The gods laugh loudest when they hear of mortals making plans.” ≈ Anonymous
But the plan failed at just 65 miles above Rocky Knob, in the sweltering heat of a day inverted, as the temps soared from 28º to 89º by 2pm. At an overlook where I found two stately trees entangled side by side, one a deep but brilliant magenta; the other a saturated golden yellow, I made about eight shots, then decided to peel off some of my winter layers in the heat. Two miles further up the Parkway I stopped to shoot a bridge.
My iPhone was missing. It had gone AWOL. I flipped the Jeep around, raced back quickly, eyes glued to the road in case I had placed it on the hood. But I was sure the greatest likelihood was that it was laying in the deep green grass of that overlook around where I’d offed my layers. It was not. I spent three hours searching for it, walking the two miles to the bridge, searching the entire way there and back to the Jeep at the offending overlook.
At 5:30pm that day I started the Jeep again, then drove to I-81, and then back to Knoxville as fast as I could. A long protracted search was crafted into being, calling up and down the parkway to visitors centers, ranger offices, and the Blue Ridge Parkways Main Center. Apple Tech. Credo Mobile. Every trick was tried, every suggestion followed.
It was never recovered, nor were those 7900 images.
One does not lose 7,900 images shot over roughly twelve days grueling it up the parkways to obtain what Mother Nature seems not to want to offer without pause for contemplation. This October will be just two years from that October 13th. I think I now know where I will spend 12-15 days this October, between the lower Rocky Knob picnic area and Staunton, Virginia.
For there is a personal family mystery residing within a Staunton building, once a dormitory and sorority clubroom on the third floor of what is now a hotel in the midst of that city, just blocks from Mary Baldwin University. There is history there as well, along with an epic collapse of what two young people once thought to be unassailable.
It will be posted soon and titled “Box 448—Letters from Staunton.”
“Rocky Knob Agos,” digital photograph from ‘The Parkways Projects,’ 2019. Image Copyright 2025 Tom Ogburn. Words all rights reserved.