[Note: Approximately one year ago, my life at Mammoth Cave was deeply enriched with an after-hours trip to Echo River. Tonight, it was further enriched with a trip along the Violet City Lantern Tour route, which has been discontinued for the season due to budget cuts from the sequestration.]
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
11:00 p.m.
Seasonal Quarters
Most jobs have benefits. Not the health insurance kind, but little perks for being an employee of that particular firm. At Wal-Mart, I received a 10% discount to make up for being an indentured servant. At the gas station in college, I got free drinks, control over the radio station, and had the benefit of interacting with (mostly) great people on a daily basis. As a park ranger, I’ve been the keeper of powerful stories about some of the nation’s most revered leaders, bravest teenagers, and nature’s dramatic forces. Today seemed less about the power of history or nature and more about the power of a looming dissertation over the grad student’s mind.
I started my day researching at Western Kentucky University. Part of my dissertation on national parks in the South will involve Mammoth Cave, so I am using my lieu days to knock out chunks of archival research. Today I held in my hands letters from Floyd Collins’s brothers, Homer and Marshal, about the future of their family’s land and Crystal Cave in the plans of the national park. I read memoranda back and forth between officials over the dire financial straits of the Mammoth Cave National Park Association and the diminishing possibility of the proposed national park. I pored over the fountain pen loops of Charles Hunt in his quest to gain options on residents‘ land for the benefit of the nation. As a researcher and ardent admirer of Mammoth Cave history, I was in research heaven.
On the drive from Bowling Green to Mammoth Cave one has time for some reflection on the day’s events, but my day was far from over. For tonight came one of those perks of working at Mammoth Cave National Park: an after-hours trip in the world’s longest cave. Bobby Steenbergen and Richard Howell planned a Violet City Lantern Tour for this evening, and I was the first to sign up when they placed the announcement on the refrigerator. It had been since last June during seasonals training that I had been in that part of the cave, and was likely the only time I would get to do that route given the budget cuts of the sequestration. I also didn’t fully appreciate the full extent of Mammoth Cave’s history at that time, since it was all new to me and I barely knew the difference between George Slaughter Gatewood and George Morrison. Twenty-four or so others signed up as well, but only ten or so actually showed up, making the group a bit more intimate and allowing us a little more freedom with how we could spend our time.
Every other after-hours trip I’ve been on started somewhere other than the Historic Entrance. Tonight we walked down the old familiar hill, felt the old familiar chill as we rounded the steps, descended through the old familiar Historic Entrance as the post-solstice sunlight trickled into the twilight zone, setting the scene that surely thousands witnessed prior to our little party’s journey into the darkness.
We kept a quick pace through Broadway, passing the Rotunda, Methodist Church, Booth’s Amphitheater, briefly pausing to notice artifacts along the trail that none but the most careful visitor might see. We moved past Giant’s Coffin, Acute Angle, Charles Harvey’s Lost Way, the TB huts, and Star Chamber, so as to get to the heart of our trip.
And what a trip it was! Late Archaic/Early Woodland artifacts were seemingly everywhere, torches scattered about breakdown areas. Climbing poles spanned gaps that made one respect their agility and ingenuity if nothing else.
Bobby and Richard pointed out numerous artifacts and signatures, including a scratched-out Stephen Gorin, which would have been Stephen Bishop’s name when Franklin Gorin owned him. We saw the development of Stephen’s handwriting along Fox Avenue, which I suddenly recalled seeing during training even though I originally thought I had never been down Fox (Again, it was all new to me and I did not take as many notes on that trip. I know what you are thinking: What?). There was along the wall just past Monument Hill, I believe, a cursive “Stephen” with no last name in two places.
One of the best parts of any cave tour is knowing that we are following in the footsteps of some of the greats like Stephen, Mat, Nick, Alfred, Ed, and others. Bobby and Richard were kind enough to illuminate the old guide’s trails those men used in their day, while we walked on the CCC trails of ours. We were able to see the popular spots for throwing torches to light up rooms like Wright’s Rotunda, the Cataracts, and Chief City. Bobby even admitted that while he could ring the Bell fairly easily, he could never get a torch into the Keyhole. While I understand the multiple reasons to have ended torch-throwing, it feels like we have lost a traditional part of that 19th century-style cave experience. Torches might not have been the most important tradition at Mammoth Cave, but they provided, or at least seem to have provided, a crucial link with tours of yore, of seeing the splendor of cave lit up in a similar way some of those first tourists saw beyond the glow of the lantern.
It’s amazing how quickly I forgot how large Chief City is. When the only large room one sees on a regular basis is the Rotunda, it can be hard to remember how Chief City dwarfs it. We took a brief break and noted the different shades of gypsum above us, and the countless torches and artifacts all around us. And even though we had walked for about two miles to get to that point, it seemed to me, anyway, shorter than a regular historic tour. I suppose I feed off the energy of seeing parts of the cave I do not normally see. I needed that energy to get up the next hill, “Cripple’s Trouble” [I believe? Correct me if I’m wrong on the name] and on to Ultima Thule, past Bishop Pit and Kaemper Hall.
We paused again at Elizabeth’s Dome, where Richard shined his flashlight on the trickle of water gravity was taking into the depths of the cave. The lantern light seemed to disappear from my sight, as I only saw, or perhaps my eyes merely chose to see only the water trickling down, drop by drop, splash by splash, while the dark void of Violet City seemed to loom ahead through the natural archway, carved out who knows how millions of years ago.
As we passed through Violet City, I was once again reminded of my research. Violet City takes its name from Violet Blair Janin, a Washington blue blood, and heiress of Dr. John Croghan who came back to Kentucky to oversee cave and hospitality operations. As per the stipulations of Dr. Croghan’s final will and testament that the cave remain in their hands until the last one died, at which time it could be sold to the highest bidder. While I recognize a lot of problems of turning people’s homelands into a national park, I am glad that the Mammoth Cave National Park Association was the ultimate purchaser of the historic estate.
It was only when we loaded up into vehicles to head back to the visitor center the cool breeze snaked through my hair while going down Violet City Road and the Mammoth Cave Parkway, then blended with the smoke rising out of the campground as visitors readied for slumber this muggy July night. We remarked how lucky we were to get to go on these trips, and that they were the best part of working at Mammoth Cave National Park. As much as I enjoy guiding visitors through the world’s longest cave, I also like to experience the cave without being responsible for 120 people at a time.
And then I thought of something I usually talk to visitors about on my New Entrance tour. Influenced by the late, great Rick Sanders, I have taken to organizing my take on this geology tour around the theme of a biography of the cave, where we meet different characters in the life of the cave (namely limestone, carbonic acid, gravity, and people), some sticking around in the cave’s life for longer than others. Even though I am a guide through Mammoth Cave, I am really just a frequent visitor. This cave has seen millions of people over thousands of years, and we are just one of those ephemeral forces leaving our mark on the landscape in the form of footprints, and maybe a stray hair or pieces of lint. We are just visitors in the seemingly eternal life of the cave.
We might joke about the frequency and unchanging nature of visitor questions while on cave tours (“Where does that cave go?” “How far down are we?” “What’s above us?”) but they’re really reminders of our curiosity about this “grand, gloomy, and peculiar place.” That curiosity of what’s down that deep, dark hole in the ground is what brought those very first visitors into the cave thousands of years ago, and what keeps bringing visitors off the hypnosis of interstate travel and into the cave today. Guiding can sometimes take away that curiosity for a moment, but the perquisite after-hours trips brings my own spirit of inquisitiveness throttling back. Not Bad Duty.
