More Than it Shows

If you take the time to scroll through the whole photo gallery each day, rather than relying only on the facial recognition feature to find your daughter, you will eventually come across a photo that’s puzzling. Girls tangled together in some contorted pose. A swimming spot you don’t recognize. A kid in unfamiliar gear, or standing next to a pony, or grinning in front of a rock face that’s clearly nowhere near her cabin. “What is going on?” is the natural question. A photo catches a single second, and most of these snapshots belong to a longer story you can’t easily see. So let me take a handful of this week’s photos and fill in what’s around them.

Start with the featured photo at the top of this post: five girls, ice cream cones in hand, all smiles, with the Dolly’s trolley parked behind them and the hillside lodge farther in the background. Nobody saw that one coming. After lunch on Friday, the trolley from Dolly’s, the beloved ice cream stand at the entrance to the Pisgah Forest, rolled into camp as a surprise for everyone. It was a welcome sweet treat on a warm afternoon, and a happy jolt of surprise on an ordinary Friday.

Then there’s the circle of senior girls holding hands on the Landsports field, one of them halfway through a hula hoop. That was cabin day, when each cabin group dreams up its own adventure for the afternoon, and the Seniors settled on a slate of relay games. In this one, the girls hold hands in a circle and race a hula hoop all the way around it, which means each girl has to step, wiggle, and fold her whole body through the hoop without ever grasping it. The contortions this requires are hilarious, and the photo catches one mid-wiggle. They ran a three-legged race too, plus a sponge-and-bucket water relay and an egg and spoon relay. The photo shows the twist. The laughing you’ll have to imagine.

The unfamiliar swimming spot is a place we call Mermaid Cove, and the girls wading in it are a junior cabin that hiked out to it for their cabin day adventure. It sits along Dunn’s Creek below Rockbrook Falls, and offers a little waterfall dropping into a sandy-bottomed pool, a giant rock face with an overhang rising on one side and the deep forest leading back to camp on the other. Dappled sunlight comes through the trees in the midafternoon, and the water stays cool enough to feel perfect on a warm summer day. The girls can wade right in and play. Some spots at camp feel found rather than built, almost magical really, and this cove is one of them.

Other photos come from farther afield, so it’s worth explaining how trips work at Rockbrook. Beyond the in-camp activities each camper has as part of her regular day, the outdoor adventure staff announces special optional trips most days at breakfast and lunch, trips like rock climbing, kayaking, rafting, hiking, backpacking, and canoeing. One might be a half-day hike or a full day of rock climbing. It could mean hiking to a view, romping through a creek, visiting a nearby swimming hole, or a trip up to the cave under Dunn’s Rock (the “Nest”) for some hammock time. You just never know what will be announced. And because these trips are extra, they present each girl with a real choice: is she willing to skip riflery and tennis tomorrow morning to go rock climbing instead? There always seem to be girls ready to say yes, especially this session.

That’s how a group of senior girls ended up canoeing the French Broad on a two-day, fifteen-mile paddle from Mills River to Asheville. This section is quite wide, and a long stretch runs through the Biltmore Estate, with no houses or development visible from the river. You can even spy the mansion itself from the water in a couple of places. We have accounts of Rockbrook campers paddling this stretch of river back in the 1930s! The girls reported perfect sunny weather the whole way, and the trip ended with a celebration late lunch at a food truck in Asheville. Fifteen miles of paddling earns a good lunch.

The girls in another photo are Middlers who were on a backpacking trip this week. They carried everything themselves, tents and food and water, and hiked about a mile and a half into the forest to set up their campsite not far from the Davidson River. Then they packed a dinner and kept climbing, up to the top of John Rock to eat it while the sun went down. The light gets better and better as it sets up there, shining across the valley onto Looking Glass Rock. It’s easily one of the best hiking views in the Pisgah National Forest.

And the pony carrying that young rider is Zoey. All of our horses have names, of course, and each has a distinct personality, but Zoey is something of a princess at the barn and one of the most popular animals at camp. She’s a Welsh cross pony who has been part of Rockbrook, and of Free Rein, the therapeutic riding program we host during the school year, since about 2018. She loves working with kids and teaching them how to ride, and when a skilled higher-level rider is small enough to ride her, she can even do a little jumping. Zoey has been teaching girls to ride for more summers than many of our campers have been coming to Rockbrook.

Every one of these photos holds more than it shows. Behind the silly pose is a cabin adventure, behind the unfamiliar river is a choice a girl made at lunch, behind the ice cream cones is a surprise the whole camp shared, and behind the pony is eight years of patient teaching. I wish we could somehow capture even more. So when a photo in the gallery leaves you wondering what’s going on, take it as a good sign. It means your Rockbrook girl is in the middle of something that only happens thanks to the richness of camp life. Tonight the girls who paddled past the Biltmore and the girls who wiggled through hula hoops are back on their cabin porches, trading these stories while the creek runs by in the dark. The photos give you a glimpse. The stories are coming home with her.