Over and Under Read online

  Silver Creek wound back into the hills across giant banks of freshwater mussels. I don’t mean one or two lonely shells clinging to rocks; I’m talking about sheets of the things, thriving generations crusted on top of one another in porous layers that the water ran through with a distinctive, high-pitched sizzle. At Indiana University, in Bloomington, not all that far from Borden as the crow flies, I read once that freshwater mussels were endangered. I laughed out loud right there in the Main Library—Tom and I used to fill our backpacks with the empty shells and pretend they were money in our games. Downstream from the mussel banks, Silver Creek widened and slowed, and on still summer days freshwater jellyfish paraded by, almost invisible to the untrained eye—they looked like pieces of Kleenex drifting just beneath the surface. Boys at school brought giant caterpillars stuffed into Mason jars for show-and-tell, behemoths as big around as Coke cans, with orange horns and elaborate fake eyes imprinted on their backs by the Creator. Between our steep hills sat small, deep, wedge-shaped ponds, home to croaking amphibians we called “mud puppies,” and slime-covered primitive fish with twitchy, stunted legs. My parents had spent good money, they periodically reminded me, on the set of red junior Encyclopedia Britannicas, in my room. They stood in regal alphabetical order above my Springfield M6 rifle in its gun rack, my two most valuable possessions displayed on the same windowless wall. Those encyclopedias showed in exquisite color plates the grotesque Sargassum fish from the Red Sea, and Hawaii’s beautiful Moorish idol, but none of Borden’s local wildlife. It was too exotic to be included.

  The strange biosphere continued below our feet. The valley was riven with limestone caves. Some were roped off, domesticated, and turned into tourist attractions for the Louisville families not worn out by their daylong harvest of whatever U-Pick crop was in season. Each had its own unique attraction. The tour of Marengo Cave finished in a chamber where visitors were encouraged to throw coins straight up, where they would stick in a muddy ceiling sheathed by years of captive pennies and nickels. Wyandotte Cave featured the footprints of prehistoric Indians leading to cold fire pits. Most spectacularly, Squire Boone Caverns contained the bones of Daniel Boone’s brother, Squire Boone, who had asked to be interred in the cave he had discovered. Every year of grade school we field-tripped there, where somber teachers warned us in vain to be respectful as we passed the dusty coffin. I’d made the trip so many times I knew Squire’s epitaph by heart: My God my life hath much befriended, I’ll praise him till my days are ended.

  What Tom and I had discovered during the summer of the strike was that these weren’t isolated, distinct caves, each with its own exit turnstile and gift shop. The whole thing was a system, a giant network of caves that ran wild throughout the region, connecting the tourist traps, the National Forest’s caves, and the pristine caves opening in the middle of the woods that only Tom and I knew about. There was really just one giant cave. Inside it lived a community of giant white crickets, albino crawdads, and even eyeless white fish, creatures mutated to complete blindness by eons of dark isolation. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them.

  Exploring the caves had become a passion of Tom’s that summer, and he seemed to find something almost magical in the way they could lead us from one end of the valley to the other. When the Chrysler began to smolder, and boredom returned to the picket line, he suggested we head underground. The thought of that cool, dry air was tempting, and he had a theory he wanted to pursue. I turned to get a last look at Taffy as we left, but she was gone.

  Two

  Many major events of that summer were determined by the migration paths of ancient buffalo. The Buffalo Trace was a trail pounded into the southern Indiana soil over thousands of years by enormous herds of American bison. These giant communities of buffalo marched every year from the salt licks of Kentucky, across the Ohio River at its shallowest point in Clarksville, and across Indiana into their pastures in Illinois. The herds were just about gone by the time the first white settlers arrived in our state, although there are a few shocked accounts from the earliest pioneers who stepped back in wonder to watch the woolly, grunting masses of buffalo splash their way across the Ohio River. While the buffalo had been gone for two centuries by the time Tom and I came along, their trail remained, a testament to the hardness and determination in those hooves. Large sections of the trail remained wild, and provided a remarkably smooth and straight corridor through the woods for two kids on bikes. Other sections of the trace were so wide and smooth that they had been adopted by the pioneers as a ready-made frontier road, which in turn became State Highway 60, the major road through Borden. Tom and I sped down Highway 60 on our bikes after the car burning.

  We rode hard, enjoying the speed that we could gather on the asphalt. Our legs were accustomed to much harder pedaling on dirt, up hills, and through mud. We zipped through Borden’s tiny town proper, starting with Miller’s General Store and its fading RC Cola sign. Next came the three schools—elementary, junior, and high—each in ascending order up the side of Daisy Hill. Next to them rose the Victorian eminence of the Borden Institute, still grand and hopeful even in its old age. The barber shop and the hardware store marked the end of Borden’s minuscule retail district, and the post office marked the end of the town’s incorporated limits. Just past the bridge, but before the cemetery, we veered sharply off the highway to the left, like jet fighters in formation, and let our momentum push us through two feet of thick brush in the state right-of-way. We dodged the thickest tree branches as we penetrated farther, but couldn’t avoid the low-lying thorns grabbing at our bruised and scabbed legs. Just as the vegetation threatened to bring us to a stop, we burst into the clear again, like rockets pushing clear of gravity’s pull, onto the smooth path cleared for us hundreds of years ago by the buffalo.

  The trace narrowed as we rode on, forcing Tom and me into single file. We then left the easy riding of the trace and turned again into the brush, as we stood up on our pedals to gain traction. Finally, when pedaling was no longer possible, we laid our bikes down, satisfied that they were sufficiently hidden by the weeds. We continued on foot.

  I felt the cave entrance before I saw it—a thin ribbon of cool dry air that felt like air-conditioning in the middle of the sweltering woods. Tom and I walked a short distance to a shelf of limestone that hung over a cave entrance we knew well. From even just a few feet away, the entrance looked like no more than a shadow under the outcropping.

  I had suspected this was our destination when we left the picket line. The rest of Tom’s plan, like most of the cave, was a mystery to me. We ducked to enter and let our eyes adjust. The hole was smooth and the dirt floor well-traveled—we were far from the first kids in Clark County to explore the more accessible portions of this particular cave. The chamber widened a little after the entrance. We walked hunched over across the main chamber, toward a small chute that led deeper. Directly above the chute, growing from the dirt, a knobby, thick stalagmite stood guard, the first recognizable cave feature, a smooth pillar of stone pushing through a tangle of dusty tree roots. Tom reached behind it and pulled out two red plastic flashlights that he kept hidden there, and handed one to me. We clicked them on and climbed on down the chute, past two slumbering bats who ignored us.

  Fewer people had preceded us into this second chamber, judging by the dwindling number of beer cans and cigarette butts on the ground. We finally got to the far wall, the apparent end of the cave, where Tom turned and smiled, looking slightly demonic, underlit as he was by his flashlight.

  “Listen,” he said. His excited voice echoed slightly. I closed my eyes, but still heard nothing but the blood rushing in my ears. I shook my head.

  “Down here,” Tom said. I stooped over and put my head next to a hole about the size of a basketball where he was pointing. I had never noticed it before. The room we were in was not large, but I could only ever see what was inside the narrow beam of my flashlight, and it had never fallen on this particular spot before. The hole looked like someon
e had dug it out and enlarged it, but it was impossible to say when. Time froze in caves, with their constant temperature, low humidity, and eternal shelter from the elements. The hole could have been dug out the week before by some bored kids, or centuries ago by a wandering Shawnee mystic.

  With my head next to the hole and my eyes closed, I heard what Tom was talking about: swiftly running water. Water was blood to a cave, and running water meant a living cave: spectacular formations and strange creatures, our eternal quests.

  “I think we can get to Squire Boone through there,” said Tom.

  “No way.”

  “I’m not shitting,” he said. “We get through that hole, and it’ll connect.”

  I shook my head. Squire Boone was almost to the Ohio River, just a short trip from the interstate and from Kentucky. I had heard Tom say repeatedly that all the caves were connected, but this notion strained my considerable respect for his knowledge of our local geography and geology.

  “Come on,” he said, impatient with my doubts. Even as the rational part of my mind braced itself halfheartedly to debate Tom about his theory and the wisdom of pursuing it, the rest was assessing the beam coming from my red plastic flashlight: steady and strong, ready to go exploring, at least until suppertime. Tom was already digging at the hole, enlarging it one handful of gravelly dirt at a time. I heard rocks falling through it, out the other side, and landing some distance below. Soon, the hole was almost big enough to fit through, and Tom started climbing into it feetfirst.

  “Wait, you don’t know how far down that is on the other side,” I said. “You could fall two hundred feet.”

  He hesitated. “What should we do? Just walk away? Let’s try it and see.”

  “Come on out, I’ve got an idea.”

  Tom reluctantly stepped back while I sifted through the gravel he’d dug out, until I found a rock about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I shoved my arm through the hole as far as I could, up to my shoulder, until my ear was up against the wall. Then I released the rock.

  I listened to it roll. When that sound stopped, when the rock was falling through open space, I counted in my head “one Mississippi” to mark the seconds. Before I could say “miss,” the rock struck the bottom, a hard, high-pitched crack that echoed sharply.

  “Let me try that again.” I grabbed another rock from the cave floor.

  “That’s bigger,” said Tom. “It’ll fall faster.”

  “No it won’t,” I said. “But it will be louder.” I rolled it down the chute again, and counted the brief fall.

  “So how far is it, professor?”

  “It takes two seconds to fall fifty feet,” I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off my hands.

  “And it doesn’t matter how big the rock is?” He sounded as doubtful as I had about reaching Squire Boone.

  “Nope. You’d take two seconds to fall fifty feet, too. And that rock fell in less than a half-second.”

  “So…”

  “It’s hard to say. I’m guessing around ten feet.”

  “Then it’s like jumping off your porch roof,” said Tom. “That’s about ten feet. Let’s go.”

  He resumed climbing into the hole, forcing himself through it backward. At one point before he completely disappeared, he looked up at me with only his head visible, like a grinning human hunting trophy that had been mounted to the wall of the cave. Then he popped through and was gone. When I didn’t hear any screams or breaking bones, I knew I had to follow.

  It was a tight squeeze, even for wiry kids like us. I had to put my hands over my head to fit through. I pushed backward, slid for a few feet, and then fell straight down through a brief, terrifying emptiness, before landing squarely on my ass. Stars traced tiny curls in the blackness. When they faded, I pointed my flashlight straight up, to see where I had landed, but realized with awe that the size of the chamber was too large—my beam couldn’t reach the top. Tom and I had discovered something massive.

  “Holy shit,” I said, the leisurely response of my echo another indication of the room’s giant size. I swept my flashlight around; I saw Tom’s beam moving in the distance as he did the same.

  Surrounding us like the trunks of redwoods were the biggest stalagmites I had ever seen, ropy columns of pink stone that looked like molten wax, each identical, each at least twenty feet around at the base and rising straight up. They were wet—alive—still growing as water dripped onto them from the unseen ceiling, depositing tiny amounts of dissolved limestone with each drop, growing each massive column a few molecules at a time. Right through the middle of the room ran the stream we’d heard from the other side, burbling in from a hole at one end and crashing into another at the far wall. The stream had cut a trench through the stone floor as straight and true as an irrigation ditch.

  “Think how old these are,” shouted Tom from across the room. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I had been warned in countless school field trips that the oil from our hands could kill the cave formation’s growth, but I reached out anyway and put the palm of my hand against the side of one of the columns. It felt preternaturally immovable and solid, as if the columns were holding the whole surface of Clark County above us in place.

  Tom was less transfixed than I. He quickly worked his way to the other side of the chamber. “Check this out,” he shouted in the distance, his voice echoing more sharply. I walked toward his flashlight beam. It felt strange to be so far away from him in a cave, where usually things were more compact. “Look,” he said when I reached his side at the edge of the chamber.

  He had called me over to a wavy sheet of rock growing up from the floor. It was as thin as paper, thin enough that we saw the yellow glow of a flashlight held to it on the other side. Its folds and curves looked like a curtain blowing over an open window. Tom and I stood on each side, facing each other, examining it—we’d never seen anything like it in all of our explorations. Water dropped onto it from above, growing the wall microscopically, imperceptibly between us. I was lost for a minute, watching a perfectly spherical drop of water fall onto it and roll along its edge.

  “Over here,” Tom yelled from far away—he had darted away from me again, moving on with his exploration. At the end of the chamber, one of the giant treelike stalagmites had fallen. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be in the chamber when that thing had tumbled over. It was broken into three even sections, looking like a column from a ruined ancient temple. Tom scurried up the ragged broken end of one of the pieces, using the jagged nubs for handholds. He soon stood atop the fallen column, which put him within reach of a horizontal crack in the wall.

  The crack was about two feet high, and ran the length of the chamber, at least as far as we could see with our underpowered flashlights. Tom hoisted himself into the crack, and lay down inside of it, looking down at me, where I still stood on the cave floor. “Come on up,” he said.

  I hesitated.

  “Come on up,” he said again. “This crack’ll take us to Squire Boone.”

  “Wait, don’t you want to check this out? This room is better than anything at Squire Boone, even the five-dollar tour.”

  Before I was done even saying it, Tom was crawling forward, endlessly enthusiastic about finding the next chamber, learning how they all tied together. I climbed up the broken end of the column, peered inside the crack, and pulled myself up and in. Tom didn’t say anything; he continued scurrying forward, into the darkness. I paused just a moment to look ahead. The crack was rough and dirty, with no formations—it really was more of a fissure in the dirt than what we typically called a cave.

  We crawled until I completely lost track of time and distance. Gradually, the ceiling above and floor below turned back into smooth, damp limestone. I hustled to keep Tom in my light. The crack shrunk as we progressed, a millimeter at a time, until eventually I felt my back scraping against the ceiling and my belly on the floor as I moved forward. Soon, I was pushing hard through the crevice. Then I was stuck.

  I watched
as Tom, slightly smaller than me, continued forward a foot more, until he, too, was stuck fast. I could see only the soles of his shoes, struggling, his toes scraping the hard stone in an attempt to push forward. His shoes scraped a line into the thin film of watery mud that coated the rock. Then, just as I had, he tried to move backward. “Shit,” he said.

  No one knew where we were—that was my first thought. Both Tom’s parents and mine accepted that on fair summer days we would both disappear into the woods all day, returning home filthy and tired but always in time for supper. Local folklore about boys killed in the caves began racing through my mind. Being trapped in a chamber as it suddenly filled with water was one popular motif. Tom had once explained to me that a dusty cave was safe, while a wet cave like this might get flushed out once in a while by a lethal flash flood. And drowning wasn’t the only way to die in a cave. Sheriff Kohl sang lead in a gospel group around town, and I suddenly remembered a lyric he sang at the Harvest Homecoming about a Kentuckian who had died in a cave long ago: I dreamed I was a prisoner, my life I could not save. The man in that story, Floyd Collins, had died of “exposure,” a word I found horribly vague and descriptive at the same time. Without even a T-shirt to protect me, the stone on all sides leached warmth from my body. My teeth started chattering.

  “Are we screwed?” I asked, trying not to sound like too much of a puss. Tom stopped struggling just long enough to let me know that we were.