A Mammoth Adventure

One of the goals we’ve set for ourselves on this great adventure is to see all the National Parks in the country. We’ve already been to Acadia in Maine and the Grand Canyon, but all I remember of the Grand Canyon is the small-plane tour with both kids throwing up in my brand-new Coach bag. So I think we’ll visit that one again.

A few days ago, we arrived in Bowling Green for the express purpose of visiting Kentucky’s own natural wonder, Mammoth Cave, about 30 miles north of the city which, by the way, is tiny by New York standards. Tarrytown is twice as big.

We stayed in a campground just off the Interstate, right in the middle of what I am coming to know as the typical strip mall suburbs of America, with every bad food restaurant ever invented.

Mammoth Cave is so named, not for the wooly mammoths that never lived there in prehistory, but for the fact that it is mammoth. As in enormous. We took the historic tour, tracing the path of the aboriginal native Americans, when they were wanderers, alone and in small family groups, before they were tribal. They used the cave, with its something like 237 miles of tunnels, for four thousand years before abandoning it to outside living. And presumably, sunburn.

The cave was rediscovered in the 1700’s, and then was used for mining saltpeter for use in gunpowder during the Revolution. (And I always thought saltpeter’s primary use was to de-randify young men in private schools.) Once the war was over, the mining operations were no longer profitable so they were discontinued, and the cave was turned into an early tourist attraction. I saw initials and names with dates like 1839 and earlier. Today, writing on the walls is forbidden, but I did find the visitor history fascinating.

The visitors on my tour, by the way, were a bunch of High School kids from Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Idaho, in town for a National Conference of the FFA, which turned out to be the Future Farmers of America. Yes, Virginia, there still are kids who aspire to the land, only now they take courses like Ag Science and Meat Processing. They were silly, and typical, but attentive and respectful to the guide, although the lights did go out briefly three times during the tour and the girls all shrieked every time.

Inside the cave, the mining operation stands as it did 250 years ago, with the original lumber and water- sluicing pipes created out of hollowed out trees. The paths through the caves were widened and elevated where necessary by slaves who created massive walkways, each man carrying one shovel of dirt at a time.

Our two-hour tour took us only a mile or so into the cave, but we were satisfied with what we learned and enchanted by what we saw. It was cool and dry, which also accounts for the fact that we saw no stalagmites or stalactites, which are caused by dripping water. There are some elsewhere in the cave, but not on the "Historic Tour." We went down to about 320 feet below the surface, bending over to negotiate some passageways, and slipping sideways through the narrow ones. I was glad to be only 5’3” and thin enough not to embarrass myself.

The return trip was interesting, because after two miles of walking, we had to climb 255 steps up to the surface. I would have preferred a Disney mining car that rode on a little rail and winched us up to the surface, but the US Government seems to think that low lighting, the original bumpy pathways and a lung-bursting climb up to the surface all add to the experience. Oh god, how many more of these National Parks with their authentic experiences are we to endure?

On the other hand, our guide was older than we were, and he does this twice a day, sometimes more, so who am I to complain?

Damn overachiever.

Betty