When I was getting my fetchin’s-up in northern Alabama, an attractive source of mystery and adventure was cave exploring (aka spelunking), and the opportunities there seemed boundless. Even by the 1950s, the northern third of Alabama at the southern end of the Cumberland Plateaus was home to over 3000 recorded caves, and our spelunking club discovered a new one every month or two. This abundance was the result of the region’s “karst geology,” that is an area in which you are walking on the geological equivalent of Swiss cheese, water having dissolved the Paleozoic limestone bedrock into millions of cavities ranging from wide cracks to caves that could swallow a small village. When we resettled in Florida, I returned to another karst landscape, the main difference from Alabama being that Florida caves are filled with water, and Alabama caves are filled with air. Because I have neither gills nor a strong suicidal urge, I never tried cave diving. But as a teenager, exploring the air-filled caves of Alabama meant that we could sometimes push limits and see things that no human had ever seen before, finding a space that was ours and ours alone. The chance of such discoveries has appealed to my sense of exploration and curiosity all my life.
There were many interesting caves that were well known. In a couple, one descended into a “swallow hole” on a rope dangling through a waterfall and proceeded spelunking while soaking wet in caves at a steady 55o F. Underground creeks snaked through some of the caves, their wanderings carving edges sharp enough to cut flesh. Most caves provided at least some display of “speleothems” (aka stalactites and stalagmites to common folks). Some, like Tumbling Rock Cave near Scottsboro were “breathing caves” with a brisk wind whooshing into the entrance tunnel in summer and out in the winter, sometimes reversing as low- or high-pressure systems passed over. Tumbling Rock was one of the longest caves in Alabama with internal waterfalls, and rooms well over 100 feet high, one containing a precariously unstable scree slope (hence the name). Its rocks rang like bells when tapped. Even our “grown-up”, experienced cavers shied away from that scree.
Although it is inconceivable in today’s world, we teenagers sometimes explored caves without adult supervision. Thinking back, I suppose we were under-equipped, but it all seemed enough. We wore clothes that could get really dirty sliding around in the sticky, heavy clay soils that caves shared with the above-ground region. We didn’t think to supply ourselves with helmets, we just kept an eye on the ceiling and ducked when needed. Light was provided by carbide lamps, and we always carried an extra pound of calcium carbide for when the carbide had to be replenished. A load was good for several hours. Such lamps were far superior to the battery-powered lights of the era.
Of all the caves we slithered and stumbled around in, one stands out as special, Cross Cave near the hamlet of Paint Rock, because in this cave we realized that the limits of the cave were an illusion, and we found a space that was ours alone.
The cave’s modest entrance opened quickly into a very large chamber with an imposing dripstone column that took up a lot of space. During the Civil War, the bat guano in this chamber had been processed into nitrate to make rebel gunpowder. A few remnants of this industry littered the floor. The limits of the cave seemed very clear--- to one side, the cave wall simply met the floor at something close to a right angle, but on the other side, the cave ceiling simply got lower and lower until the smooth clay floor seemed to merge with the ceiling. It looked like you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between the floor and the ceiling. At least it looked that way by the light of the carbide lamps from our perspective low on the cave floor. There seemed no future in exploring that direction, and indeed, apparently none had, because the smooth clay bore no marks at all, marks that, had they existed, would have been visible for centuries.
But for reasons I cannot remember, we began to wonder whether what we were seeing was real and began to consider that the merging of the floor with the ceiling was an illusion. Too low to move on hands and knees, we elbow-walked and slithered toward the merger, the ceiling so low that we could hardly raise our heads, and discovered that as we approached this “merging”, the floor dipped in parallel with the ceiling, allowing continued slithering for many meters, after which the ceiling once again ascended to standing height and we were in a capacious and continuing room, in places a dozen or more meters high. The absence of any marks at all on the smooth floor meant that we were the first humans that had entered this part of the cave, a cave that had been well known, explored, and exploited for well over a century. With that realization, Cross Cave became “our cave”, a space known only to us.
We returned many times to explore “our cave,” sometimes taking guests who had never explored a cave, and who, after slithering and elbow-walking for hours experienced the most painful belly-muscle soreness of their life, as if they had done 500 sit-ups. But the effort was well worth the discomfort, for the rooms of “our cave” were decorated with highly unusual speleothems called helictites. Instead of being straight down (stalactites) or straight up (stalagmites), helictites are curved, branched, twisted, solid, hollow, and generally seem to defy the rules of gravity and speleothem formation.
How they form, although the subject of several hypotheses, is still unknown. However they form, their wild complexity is a contrast to the staid up-and-downness of most cave formations. Some parts of the ceiling had thickets of hollow, pure white, delicate, water-filled “soda straws”, the speleothem most easily broken, but intact here.
The secret beauty of “our cave” enchanted me during the years we lived in Huntsville, Alabama. The lesson of Cross Cave was that limits can be illusions, and the only way you can tell is to slither, slide or otherwise propel yourself toward those limits. Only then will you be able to tell whether the limits are real or just illusions, deceptions, or mirages. Only then will you be able to find entirely new, beautiful spaces that are yours and yours alone.
Walter, I love this piece. Especially the part about breathing caves. I think it really takes me places. And there’s a reality to the writing. I appreciate it.
Another amazing adventure described in an eloquent, thought-provoking essay, accompanied by excellent photos. How did you manage such good pics? Thanks for sharing the breadth of your experiences and knowledge in these pieces.