We celebrated K’s birthday weekend with a trip down to
Mammoth Cave National Park. Caves are not really our thing; I enjoy the sound
of the word “spelunking,” but I have no desire to enact the word’s meaning.
However, this was the closest National Park, a not-too-terrible five hours’
drive away, and we’ve been trying to get in as many of the parks in as we can
before they get turned into oil fields or bases for the Space Force. What’s
more, even though I was a lot more excited about hiking the back-country
trails, you don’t go to a place called Mammoth Cave only to spend the whole
time above ground. (You also don’t go expecting to see any mammoths. Not only
are they extinct, they never made it to the caves. The “mammoth” in this case
just means big.) As such, we grudgingly allotted two hours to a
cave tour.
Our cave guide looked a bit like Jerry Garcia, though he
acted like everyone who has held a once-loved job just a bit too long. He
seemed weary, tired of telling people not to litter, not to deface the cave
walls, not to take the cave tour at all if they didn’t think they could walk
two miles that included very tight passages and a lot of stairs to climb. “The
cave is dark,” Weary Jerry warned. “Parts
may be wet and slippery. There’s a section that’s extremely narrow—they call it
‘fat man’s misery.’” There were chuckles, though I sensed anxiety, and I wondered
if a name change was in order so no one would feel fat-shamed. K, however, was
immune to fat-shaming. “Guess I’m gonna be miserable,” he joked cheerfully.
We did not end up being miserable, though at first we weren’t
all that enthralled. Last year we’d visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park and
taken a self-guided tour of some truly astonishing cave formations. You would
not believe what can happen when water meets limestone. In contrast, the cave
at Mammoth was big, empty, and nearly featureless. But then after all, we’d chosen
the “Historic Tour,” which turned out to be less about what the cave looked
like and more about how we had come to be in it in the first place. Why had
people ever entered it? What made anyone think that going down a dark hole through
slippery, narrow, miserable passages leading who knows where with who knows
what lurking ahead—how could this possibly
be a good idea? But they did go. Thousands of years ago, well before it was “discovered”
by Europeans, people explored the caves.
“This,” said Weary Jerry, some of his weariness receding as
his eyes glimmered in the very faint light he held up. “This is all the light
you would have if you were one of the first people here. How far would you have
gone if this was all you could see?”
People murmured indistinctly, though “not far” seemed to be
the general buzz, and not at all was
what went through my own mind. Ironically, at that moment many friends of mine
were finishing an ultramarathon back home, one that I’d done several times in
the past. The idea of running in circles under the hot August sun for eight hours
is a definite “not at all” to most people, and yet it made so much more sense
to me than the idea of spending any amount of time here, without proper lighting or footwear, a paved path or a
guide, even a jaded one counting down the days ‘til retirement.
“We’re coming to the ‘bottomless pit,’” the guide went on,
the edge returning to his voice as he no doubt was making bets with himself as
to how many morons would toss coins down there this time. “Up until about 1840, this was the farthest anyone had
dared to go. At that time, a slave named
Stephen Bishop, who was one of the cave guides, extended a
ladder over the pit and became the first person to go beyond it.”
Bishop, we learned, opened up a whole new part of the cave full
of wonders to discover, including a river with eyeless fish no one had known
even existed. He continued to explore the subterranean world and ended up creating some of the first extensive maps of the caves. And thus were we here, because one person, and
others after him, and untold numbers before him, not only asked a question—What’s out there?—but decided the answer
was worth pursuing no matter what.
People are bizarre. You think an eyeless fish is weird? It
isn’t. If you live in a river in a pitch-black cave, what is there to see?
People meanwhile can see, yet they
willingly go where they can’t—and try to anyway. The human condition is crazy
with contradictions, our stubborn belief that unswerving persistence will pay
off paired with an openness to possibilities, an insatiable curiosity, the
desire to delve into the unknown and find out what’s there. Let’s see how
far this cave goes. Let’s see how long we can keep running. There’s a
bottomless pit ahead of us that seems to mark our absolute limits. Let’s try to
cross it, shall we?
You're on to something in the final paragraph. Why do we do tasks and adventures like that? Because we can try. Your description reminds of Twain's "Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn."
ReplyDeleteWeary Jerry would be proud.
"Oh he may be weary
Them tour guides they do get wearied
Wearing that same old shaggy garb, yeah, yeah
But when Jerry gets weary
Try a little tenderness, yeah, yeah"
Thanks, QBN. I don't know how many times during my travels I've had these kinds of thoughts: what on earth made people DO this? Why did they climb crazy mountains or go into caves or a million other seemingly irrational things? But they did. (Love the altered lyrics, btw.)
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