April 16-17
Monday I had tickets to the wimps’ tour. It is billed as fully accessible. No stairs anywhere. You even enter by elevator, a trip of 200 feet or more below ground.
This tour was led by Ranger Elaine, who led the Frozen Niagara tour on Sunday.
Instead of taking a bus, you drive in your own car to the entrance for the tour. This trip had four cars with a total of nine people led by the rangers in a park van. There were no canes, walkers, or wheel-chairs, so maybe that constitutes a spry group for this event.
Mammoth Cave is a labyrinth of passages whose cumulative length is unknown. More than 400 miles of passages have been explored so far. Only a tiny fraction of that is open to tours for greenhorns.
After all, we’ve paid attention to the movies. You never can tell what kind of cannibal society has developed down there over the millennia. Can’t have taxpayers wandering into that.
There had been four or five known cave systems in the area, and tourism began there as far back as 200 years ago.
Cave explorers trekked through the guano for years. Those that weren’t eaten by cannibals eventually discovered that the different caves were all connected and part of one greater cave structure.
And they’re still trekking, crawling through tight spaces, following an errant breeze because it may mean that a passage leads somewhere.
There is one tour available to the public that lets you play spelunker. Everybody puts on protective clothing, knee pads, and miners’ hats with lights in front. But hey, I’m way too claustrophobic for that.
The accessible tour starts in a passage that was a tourist destination in the 19th century.
It follows a tunnel with an oval cross-section cut by an underground river before the water table dropped. The Green River, where the cave waters drain, is eroding a deeper bed, and as it sinks, so do the cave waters. The current underground streams are about five levels down in the cave.
One of the first sights we came to was a historic bit of graffiti:
SUSIE ARMSTRONG
AUG. 27, 69
… As in 1869.
It was written with the smoke of a tallow candle, in large pixels—dots of about an inch, one at a time.
According to Ranger Elaine, Ms. Armstrong would have had to walk for about eight hours to get to this spot from the natural entrance, which was the only way in at the time.
We came next to an old cafeteria counter and picnic tables. It gave me flashbacks to the Seattle Underground tour.
But in this case, we were in a rock chamber whose ceiling is pocked with bumps of gypsum. An observer once said the place looked as if a bunch of children had thrown snowballs at the roof.
People actually used to cook there, and over the years smoke turned the gypsum black.
Volunteers cleaned the roof and walls with a bleach solution. Maybe not the best restorative method, but it did recover some of the lost whiteness. The snowballs now have a grey patina, like maybe the kids who threw them had sooty hands.
The cleaning also uncovered considerably more graffiti, including a plug for Hoofland’s Tonic, which has been found elsewhere in the cave.
One in pencil reads: To Nick the Guide.
Nick is identified as Nicholas Bransford, one of several slaves who led guided tours in the 1830s and ’40s.
The most famous of the enslaved guides is Stephen Bishop, who not only led tours, but also explored the place extensively on his own. He discovered several features that are parts of current tours, including the gypsum-covered chambers and passages where the accessible tour went.
He was also first to draw a map of Mammoth Cave. When it was included in a book years later, he was actually given credit for it by name. It made him an international celebrity. They say people came to the cave from as far away as Europe and requested Bishop as their guide.
But recognition didn’t set him free, at least right away. He wasn’t freed until he was 56. He died a year later.
Water for the cafeteria came from the Upside Down Well, so called because the drillers began in a deep underground passage and drilled upward to reach an aquifer. The well made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Another section of the tunnel ceiling is covered with gypsum flowers. Like most of this stuff, I had never heard of them before. All I know now is that they are the result of slow water activity, and under the right conditions, the gypsum is deposited in swirls that do indeed look like exotic flowers.
Souvenir hunters used to cut them off the roof, so there are smooth places where flowers used to be. According to Ranger Elaine, people would carry them away in baskets.
The weight of the baskets grew heavier as the people walked back to the entrance. Eight hours is a long walk, even without a bag full of rocks.
So discarded gypsum flowers, products of millennia of water droplets, are found abandoned on the route back to the entrance.
There is also debris left by picnickers among the rocks. They stuffed empty bottles and broken crockery in niches. The stuff has been there so long that it’s not litter anymore, but historical artifacts, which are left in place.
Neither of my tours came near the historical entrance, which is a short walk from the visitor center. It’s in a deep ravine, and at least on Monday, after days of rain, a thin waterfall veiled part of the great opening. As you go down, you can see there is a tunnel going into the mountain.
It’s one of those spooky places where you expect to see a lady dressed in white and get to ask her questions about the future.
It’s the picture of the day. You don’t see the Sybil because she ducked out for a smoke.
Paleo-Indians used the cave for almost 3,000 years. They left or lost artifacts like straw slippers, burnt-out torches made of cane stalks, and empty vessels.
According to the notes in the museum at the visitor center, the oldest have been dated to about 5,000 years ago. The most recent Indian artifacts are 2,200 years old.
Did they stop going in? Nobody knows. Maybe they just got more careful about leaving litter behind.
Tuesday was moving day. My route to Winchester, Ky., passed near the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park.
The visitor center is at farm site called Sinking Spring, near Hodgenville, Ky. It focuses on Lincoln’s time as child in Kentucky, before the family moved to Indiana.
I picked up an odd bit of useful trivia there. During his Kentucky years, Lincoln and his sister briefly attended an ABC school, also known as a “blab school,” because paper and writing implements were scarce and so children recited their lessons aloud.
It suggests a new dimension to Walt Whitman’s phrase “blab of the pave.”
The big feature is a neo-classical monument. It sits on a rise, and you have to climb 56 steps, one for each year of Lincoln’s life, to reach it. Inside is a one-room log cabin.
At one time it was thought to be the actual cabin where Lincoln was born. An entrepreneur for a while made it into a touring exhibit. He would take it apart and rebuild it in various cities.
It was finally brought here to be housed in the monument.
Teddy Roosevelt headlined the laying of the cornerstone on Lincoln’s 100th birthday in 1909. Taft dedicated the finished monument two years later.
More years later researchers turned up evidence that it couldn’t be the original cabin at all. So now it is considered a symbol of Lincoln’s humble beginnings.
The birthplace farm was known as Sinking Spring because the property has a small spring that runs through rocks and falls into a vertical cave. It looks like a miniature version of the Mammoth Cave’s historical entrance.
Who knows? Somebody in a miner’s hat may eventually find that it, too, is connected to Mammoth Cave.
Thomas Lincoln’s title to the Sinking Spring farm was challenged and he lost. He moved the family a several miles away to a place called Knob Creek where he leased 30 acres. The site is part of the birthplace national park.
His landlord’s title was challenged a few years later, and the tenants, including the Lincoln family, faced eviction. That’s when Papa Lincoln gave up and moved everybody to Indiana.
Next to the Sinking Spring part of the park is a log store and several small log cabins called the Nancy Lincoln Inn. It opened in 1928 and is privately owned. It was closed when I was there, but whether for the season or permanently, I don’t know.
The Knob Creek site has the Lincoln Tavern, which opened in 1933 and also was closed when I was there. It is a large log structure. Unlike the Nancy Lincoln Inn, the property wasn’t chained off, so I got a close-up look.
One continuous wall is two logs long. The pairs of logs are joined in the middle by making a cut in the end of each one so two half-circle cross-sections come together.
Another small cabin sits nearby. It is said to be the cabin of a neighboring family named Gollaher and was moved to the site at some point. There is a story that the Gollaher’s son, Austin, pulled Abraham Lincoln out of danger after he fell into a river. Lincoln couldn’t swim.
Dinner was at the Engine House Pizza Pub. One of the house specialty pies is called Luca Brasi Sleeps With the Fishes. It’s a combination of pepperoni, capicola, sweet sausage, giardiniera, and Kalamata olives.
It was terrific. A little over the top, maybe frightening, just like Luca Brasi, but terrific.
The beer selection was limited. I managed to get West 6th amber on tap and Against the Grain Brown Note in a can. Both were good, and very different from each other. The amber was close to an English bitter; the brown ale had an almost burnt grain flavor.
Then I went back to the hotel to sleep with dreams of fishes.
Good night, all.
Harry
April 19
Hi, Grasshopper,
I've clearly been in Provence too long (or maybe not long enough).
When I saw the word "cave" in your subject line I got all excited thinking you found a wine producer to visit!
But happy, nonetheless, to learn you are having fun.
One more week here, dinner in Aix-en-Provence on Thursday, after which, I will be staying at a hotel near Marseille-Provence Airport, a la mode de Harry Hutchinson.
I'll have a layover on Friday in Amsterdam long enough for lunch, a beer, and a joint or two with Sir Michael.
Let's try to talk when I get back to Bangkok.
Ciao and happy travels.
Larry
April 19
Sounds like you're having a good time too, Sensei.
Can I use part of this on the blog when I post this trip?
If you want, I'll cut the part about the joints with Sir Michael if you don't want that published.
Yes, let's talk in a couple of weeks.
Grasshopper
April 19
I'd be delighted if you'd publish it, Grasshopper. And no need to censor.
Not to take anything away from the entertainment value of your blog, but I doubt my Thai employers are regular readers of Harry Travels.
P.S. You can use this email, too.
Invoice for both is pending.
Larry
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