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TOURING HERNANDO'S HIDEAWAY
(Desoto Caverns State Park, Alabama, Nov. 24, 2001)
"Long as a football field," he claimed, and we
ahhed at the soaring ceiling, the massive
stalactites/-mites and formations that the guide
told us resembled an old man and his dog,
or a witch, or a large-mouth bass or....
But why DeSoto? And why not? If he'd really
been there no one knew, but he was the first
white explorer in the area, being later felled
by neither tomahawk nor arrow, but a whiny
insect in what is now Louisiana.
And the cave's myriad little bats that so
effectively fed on those same insects for countless
thousands of years were felled by DDT in the
fifties and never came back. The insects survived.
Beyond sounds of tourists' footfalls the great room
silently echoes with ghosts of bats and men,
accumulated over unmeasured ages: ancient Indians
once buried their dead in that sunless underland
of the spirits, now wired and piped for tourist dollars.
Long before Jesus an exploring Indian with
flickering tinderwood torch no doubt smacked
his head on the same stalactite that tomahawked
me. And how many others in my bruised head club?
The Confederate soldiers who mined saltpeter here?
The rowdy bootleggers of the twenties who shot at flitting
bats and shattered stalactites older than civilization?
At tour's end we sit on benches under the vast, vaulted
ceiling to experience our three minutes of total darkness.
Outside the muffled rain, barely heard, infiltrates as
a multitude of trickles and drips that show us how
it all was formed. Finale? Our guide flips an electric switch,
triggering a carnival light and water show of Christian theme,
not surprising in this Bible-belted state, but no doubt as out
of place and strange to Indian ghosts as to a live skeptic.
Back outside again, we find the rain easing and twilight
giving way to night. We hurry under umbrella over wet,
crunching gravel to our car and are soon motoring back
towards Birmingham in growing autumnal darkness.
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