Meet the People

The menu of Dino’s Italian Restaurant devotes a full panel to pizzas—predesigned pies or create your own. I’m waffling over toppings and the promise of leftovers based on what size I order when my server, a plump wild-haired blonde, drops by to check on me.

She props pen to pad. “Decided what you want, hon?”

“Um, yeah. But, first, what’s the difference in size between the small and medium pizzas?”

“Well, sweetheart, the small has six pieces and the medium has eight.”

I choke back a laugh. Okaaaaaay. Maybe they measure things differently in Kentucky. I try to get her to divulge the dimensions, but pizza-diameter estimation was a weak subject in school, so she falls back on the idea that a small serves one to two people, a medium three to four. I order the medium and polish off a third of it. It’s good pizza. My favorite combo of pepperoni, garlic, olives, mushrooms. Fresh-made dough. Thin crust. Great leftovers.

From my first night here, my time in London, Kentucky, has me talking to people. In restaurants. At the state park. Especially at Berea, a college-artisan town 45 minutes north in the foothills of the Appalachians.

The main college building in Berea; many nearby dorms and outbuildings are also brick.

Loved this tree and school entrance.

Berea College doesn’t charge tuition. Instead, students work 10 to 20 hours per week for the school—making rugs or pottery or wooden utensils to sell at the school’s shops, serving in administration or budget offices, working at the college-owned Boone Tavern Hotel and Restaurant, and so on. Under the guidance of their advisor, students must find the work, contract for it, and keep up good standing with both their job and their studies or be dismissed from the school.

Sounds like a pretty good system to me, especially because it helps folks who might not otherwise afford college to get there and graduate. Like the Negroes of the 1800s, who were the college’s primary clientele when it started in 1855. To this day, the school has great renown for its “longstanding tradition of diversity, social justice, environmental responsibility, and community service” (so says the brochure). What I saw was eco-tourism, decent weather, public art, small-town college energy, a sustainable-living mentality, clean neighborhoods, a statewide artisan guild, and an emphasis on hand-craft instead of mass production. Berea is a place I could live.

One of the many craft-selling shops run by the college or its alumni.

A modern sweat shop? This is one of the student work buildings for weaving.

Public art abounds.

Frontyard food and flower gardens are common in the heart of town.

Buttons and bumper stickers of this were everywhere. I think I just missed some sort of summer celebration.

Picture me here...

I go twice to Berea, and both times I spend hours ambling through the studio/stores and talking with people. I meet whittlers (oops, they’re called “carvers” nowadays) on the front porch of a house near the train-depot visitor’s center. John Adams, a wiry man with twinkling eyes and white stubble along his jaw line, puts pocketknife to raw square pegs to make long ornaments called “Santa-cicles.” Next to him, Ray is “chipping”—digging quilt patterns and complex geometries out of the surface of coaster-size squares. Over there, a fellow is carving chained links from a single length of wood, and another is chipping out an intricate floral pattern on the faces of a folding bible stand, its hinged-together top and bottom cleverly carved from a single plank.

Women are armed with knives, too, sculpt-carving birds and squirrels and cutting open-design flatwork they back with stained glass. A duck decoy takes shape on another table, and a completed collection of whimsical mountain men stands for sale. The carvers amuse themselves over visitors who try to figure out how an inch tall wooden heart-and-arrow got into a Coke bottle through a 1/4-inch hole, or how a round wooden ball got to rattling around inside a pair of interlocking cubes—the whole thing also made from one block of wood. All the artisans are in their fifties or older, and they banter as if they carve together all the time—which they do, several days a week.

Jimmie Lou, owner and creator of Hot Flash Beads nearby, politely calls me “ma’am” even though she’s easily fifteen years my senior. She wears safety goggles and a big white smock with a pink Breast Cancer ribbon as she works at a Bunsen burner and turns fragile glass rods into delicate and colorful beads, no two quite alike. She’s a cancer survivor and used to work as a lab technician examining pap smears—a highly stressful job because of all the cancer patients she was around. She started making lampwork beads when the hot flashes of menopause began (hence her shop’s name). Now she can’t stop. “It’s my therapy,” she says through a booming laugh. “Cheaper than a psychiatrist!”

Jimmie Lou at work.

Making beads two at a time means earrings usually match well.

Beads go into an oven for several hours of tempering and cool-down.

A final step in bead preparation for her jewelry: drilling out the “bead poop” that can crust up the holes.

Down the street, a bell tinkles as I open the on-the-corner door of Weaver’s Bottom Studio, and I hesitate to walk across the beautifully sparkling rag rug that greets me from the floor. It shimmers with light from fabrics that are usually relegated to princess costumes, ice skating outfits, and cheerleading squads.

I am about to take a larger-than-life step to avoid the rug when a man laughs from somewhere behind an enormous loom and a rack of woven placemats and towels.

“It’s OK to walk on it. Come on in. That’s what rugs are for.”

A stocky fellow with a long graying braid, deep dimples, and a hang-loose disposition comes down the narrow aisle of the store.

“I’ve never seen one of these with glitter in it,” I marvel, still entranced by the rug.

“My wife does that. She says everyone should have some sparkle in their lives.”

I spend a good half hour here, talking to Neil Colmer about his product. Wool skeins line the walls. Six feet of glass case and a cash register are nearly hidden by racks and stacks of woven dish cloths; bins of rag rugs and piles of placemats cover the floor and tables and a tall bookshelf.

Neil was almost always smiling.

He has four or five looms in the shop, each for different kinds of work, including a double-backed weave that uses over 200 thread shots before the pattern repeats. This kind of loom is so complex that it requires a narrow strip with little brads to activate the 16 frames that move up and down in the required sequence; it reminds me of a player piano’s pegs getting activated by hole-punched paper, but the strip runs vertically, looking like 9 yards of peaceful ordnance for a decommissioned machine gun. It can take days to set up this loom for a pattern.

A double-weave loom makes a pattern on both sides of the fabric, for reversible use. It takes 16 frames...

...all lifted and dropped in the proper sequence and combination by an advancing strip of carefully placed brads.

The gorgeous weave of this particular brad pattern.

Neil demonstrates on both this loom and another that has a pulley-based shuttle thrower, and happily answers gobs of questions from me and a couple of other visitors. Like many other craftspeople I end up meeting, he’s a Berea graduate, and has worked in numerous artistic fields, including music. He prefers traditional equipment over the modern industrial looms he’s worked with.

“Modern looms go so fast they have to keep cameras on them,” he says. “When a machine goes down, the factory guys can slow down the videotape and see what happened. Otherwise they’d never know what went wrong. And rather than send a shuttle back and forth, air shoots the thread across, and the machine mechanically ties and tucks and snips the ends all in one motion.”

It’s a long way from the swish of hand-shot shuttles, the dance of tennis shoes on foot pedals, and the clack of warp frames rising and falling in the looms of Neil’s shop. He even carves his own shuttles when he needs them.

Neil can quickly churn out yards of multicolor towels on this pulley-based loom.

Across the street in a pewter studio, I’m invited by the cashier to talk to the craftsman, John Gastineau. “I think he’s still in there, but maybe he’s already gone for the day. Go check.”

She points to the door of a narrow workshop that’s half the depth of the studio’s building and fronted with a counter that keeps visitors from some serious-looking metal-working machinery. A large-screen computer dominates a tool-littered table, and the dust and detritus of pewter design, casting, and shaping is everywhere.

At my timid “Hello?” a white-bearded, cotton-smocked man turns to greet me like a just-rousing bear, and I sense he really doesn’t want another visitor. Nonetheless, he speaks cordially enough, and I ask a question or two about the 3D hummingbird image that’s on the computer, and what kind of drawing software he uses. My computer knowledge and interest seem to warm him up.

“You’d be surprised how many people think ‘true’ craftsman shouldn’t use computers,” he grumps as he puts hand to mouse, “but it’s a tool that saves me a lot of time and lets me control exactly how something looks.”

John at his drawing software.

He zooms in on the hummingbird and scrubs the pointer across the screen, pulling up new windows and dragging points and selecting complex-looking options to demonstrate how easily he can reshape the picture and its 3D profile, then he points to the various machines that convert the drawing into working pewter molds. I’m soon fingering blanks and templates and castings and trying to keep up—he’s explaining the process a little too quickly for me to fully absorb all the tasks, but he’s definitely happy to be talking.

Molds and test casts and other intermediate steps on their way to pewter medallions.

Before I know it, John has grabbed a shiny 4-inch disc of pewter and is clamping it at the base of a solid, flared cylinder on a lathe. He turns on the machine, and as he and I avidly discuss Berea, politics, and the world’s changing (as in declining) values, he presses a wooden stick to the spinning disc and deftly folds the disc over the conical form to create a pewter cup. He gives the cup a rolled edge, removes it from the lathe, and hands it over for my inspection—I hold a warm, slightly oily, perfectly formed pewter jigger, made in less than ten minutes while we talked. I decide to buy this one, and he etches its bottom with a computer-controlled engraver. The jigger is perfect for margaritas.

Disc centered in lathe.

Coaxing it onto the form.

Guiding the progress and keeping it round.

Nearly all the way down the form.

A lucky candid shot; he had no idea I was taking it because I was holding the camera so casually.

Rolling the top edge.

My handcrafted cup, hot off the lathe.

“Berea is an island of liberalism in a sea of Kentucky Republicans,” says Theresa, a potter who now co-runs a shop with a silversmith. She’s been here nearly twenty years, a Berea graduate. “Not all of them make it,” she says. “It’s a tough school.” She and two other women started an artists’ co-op years ago that’s still thriving. “Everyone today is worried about money. How to make it, how to make more of it. We started that business with almost nothing.

“Our accounts were all on paper then, and Joan was always worried about the money. Linda would wave her hand and say, ‘Oh, money is only jots on paper,’ and not worry about it at all. But now it’s all electronic isn’t it? E-mail, bank statements, online transactions. Joan still worries about money, but now Linda says, ‘Stop worrying! Money is just bits of light on glass!’”

Adopting her blithe approach to cash flow, I decide to skip a sandwich dinner and treat myself to a white tablecloth meal at Boone Tavern. This place is celebrating its centennial thanks to a recommendation by a certain Duncan Hines. Yes, he’s a real person, and he created the first ever restaurant guide as he traveled the US during the 1930s. His Adventures in Good Eating also recommended the Sanders Café—of later Kentucky Fried Chicken fame—in nearby Corbin. Both restaurants, among many others in the pre-interstate days, went on to success because of his good opinion.

Boone Tavern is an outgrowth of the home-cooked meals and lodging that the college president and his wife used to provide to college visitors.

As much as possible, the food here is supplied by Berea student farms, including the vegetables, fruit, lamb, beef, and pork (but not the chicken—odd). I have the crab cakes and salmon, which are of course imported (Atlantic). The orange marmalade vinaigrette dressing for the salad is tart and sweet.

Mmmm, salmon. My first fish since leaving the west coast for the heartland.

Steven, a spiffily-dressed assistant server who watches over water and coffee levels and distributes fresh helpings of hot spoonbread, tells me there’s a Spoonbread Festival every September at Boone Tavern.

“It’s what we’re famous for here. We’ve been serving it for 100 years, ever since we’ve been open.”

Basically it’s a squat cornmeal soufflé—scooped up from a casserole dish and served as a substitute for bread. It’s smooth and creamy and begs for a fork instead of fingers. Steven brings me a recipe card to keep. It’s time-consuming to cook (think risotto), but would be yummy made with the freshly ground cornmeal I bought at McHargue’s Mill.

Steven with hot, fresh spoonbread.

I’m in a dry part of the state—from here to the southern KY border—so there’s no wine with dinner, although it is allowed for the restaurant’s cooking (e.g., filet mignon with burgundy). As during Prohibition, that which is outlawed becomes more desirable, so many Kentuckians head north to Richmond (local billboards announce: “We Sell Liquor! Exit 90”), drive south to Tennessee, or make moonshine on the side.

“It’s the real stuff I wish they’d sell,” laments a big-bellied man who stops next to me later in the specialty foods section of the Kentucky Artisan Center just north of Berea. He grimaces toward the bottles of bourbon-spiked sorghum I’m looking at. “That stuff’s the only way liquor is available here.”

The man calls his young son back from a rack of handmade wooden toys and turns again to me. “If you ever see a sort of mist coming out of the woods and it’s not a foggy day, don’t go near them places. They’ll shoot on sight!”

I picture a circle of shaggy, wild-eyed men bunkered under pines at a belching still, rifles at the ready. “Uh, right,” I say. “Thanks for the tip.”

I edge away from the fellow and head for the cashier with a bottle of bourbon sorghum, sure that, at the very least, that’s one encounter with Kentucky locals I won’t be having.

By the Old Mill Stream

Having visited a working wind-powered mill in Pella, Iowa, I eagerly wait for the opening hours of the working water-powered mill at Levi Jackson State Park. It’s McHargue’s Mill (only the essential internal parts are original), and run by a friendly former park ranger named Bob. It’s also the final resting place of some forty-odd millstones—an outdoor display which, with overgrown grasses and no identifying markers, looks more like a bizarre cemetery with round, swirl-cut headstones than a fresh-air museum.

All around the mill are ducks and pond and flowing water and trees and the comforting, rhythmic drone of corn grinding between stones. What could be more relaxing way to spend a morning?

Some of these millstones are from as far away as Paris.

When properly balanced, grooved, and maintained, millstones can last hundreds of years. Good ones were so valuable that millers often took them whenever they moved, building a new mill each time.

No matter how humble the building, its beauty is in the details.

Bob explains that angled cuts at the corners kept log buildings from rotting quickly.

A stepped-down runoff like this weir can keep a stream working for the mill a long time; straight dropoffs ultimately undermine the river bottom and building foundation.

Outside, water diverted at the back of the building flows to the front to turn the primary driveshaft and wheel for the mill.

Inside, the same driveshaft sends a wide band of leather around another, smaller, shaft and wheel that actually turns the millstone.

Bob wears protection against the dust of milling. Behind him are the square hopper, where whole grain gets poured in, and the round bin surrounding the millstones. Grain gently falls through the center hole of the upper millstone, gets grabbed and smashed by the spinning stone, and works its way down the grooves of the millstones to the outer edges. Only the upper millstone spins, and it can be raised and lowered to adjust the fineness of the grind.

Ground grain falls into the waiting meal bin.

Wooden paddles for moving ground corn out of the way as more flows into the bin.

Final product: yummy unbolted (unsifted, whole-grain) corn meal in white or yellow.

BONUS! Some interesting phrase origins from milling:
Wait your turn—a bag of grain to be milled was called a turn; when the miller had a lot of customers, they had to “wait for their turn” to go into the hopper.

Put your nose to the grindstone—to check or test something; a miller sniffs the stones for a burnt-grain smell, indicating that the grind is too fast. (The erroneous connotation of this phrase—to work hard—comes from a mix-up with the phrase “shoulder to the wheel,” in which a man exerts effort to move a stuck wagon.)

Grist for the mill—topics for gossip; grist is seed separated from chaff, ready for grinding between stones (or, in the case of words, between teeth and jaws)

Signs of London, Kentucky Style

A highway sign in Kentucky:

Prohibited
Pedestrians
Bicycles
Motor Scooters
Metal Treads
Farm Equipment
Animals on Foot

Animals on foot? Oh, livestock. Funny image that: a herd of sheep or cattle blocking four lanes of interstate like they hold up a country road in Britain. I’m sad they’re not allowed, really. Might slow this nation down a little.

One of those blue tourist-attraction signs greets me as I arrive in this week’s town:

Welcome to London. Home of Madison McCowan. 2009 Miss KY Outstanding Teen.

Wow. Many towns announce themselves as the “gateway” to somewhere else, but this one recognizes one of its own as its point of pride. How’s that for down-home spirit?

Billboards tell a lot about an area and what its people find important enough to market. Up to now, they’ve mostly been the typical ads for food and hotels and attractions. London has a different set mixed with the rest. A goodly number advertise lawyers for car accidents, medical support for people who have trouble breathing, and hospice for the elderly. Other notable boards that speak of what troubles the population:

Gambling Can Be Addictive. Call 1-800-GAMBLER
LOSE WEIGHT STOP SMOKING With Hypnosis
Does Life Hurt? www.lifehurts.com

And my favorite:

Your Credit Won’t Fix Itself. Pay Bills On Time. www.creditfairy.org

Credit Fairy? So do you stick a credit card under your pillow and by morning the bill has been paid?

Most of current London clusters along two local highways lined with strip malls, hotels, and restaurants. A little to the north is the original Main Street, a few blocks long. US Courthouse. Laurel County Courthouse. A new multistory Laurel County Justice Center under construction. A lawyer firm on every corner. (Now I understand all those billboards for legal assistance.) A bank on every street. An insurance company on every other street. A massage and spa. Very few other businesses.

Beyond the tidy core block, Main Street disappears into ragged miles lined with dollar stores, elderly gas stations, Kroger, RiteAid, and a supermarket-sized antique mall that’s more like a huge garage sale collective. Oh, that’s right: London is flea market central—tourists actually come here for the flea markets, so this antique store cum garage sale makes sense. There are at least two other flea market locations nearby, each the size of a drive-in movie lot and open only on weekends. Lots of suntanning shops here, too, for some reason. Tammy’s Consignment and Tanning offers a unique combo: you can strip to the buff to get brown, then buy a new set of clothes to put on when you leave.

Two London side streets catch my attention at opposite ends of town: GOP Street and Middleground Way.

This area of Kentucky has drive-through tobacco shops like other towns have coffee stands. Most of the huts look dilapidated and are plastered with cigarette posters. One tobacco store was a former minimart, still pumping fuel and selling only tobacco. I’d bet that no cigarettes are sold in grocery stores.

A reminder of an older London: remains of a mining facility. This is across the road from a beautifully landscaped (grass, pond) community college and a very modern public library, all of them secluded from the more commercial parts of London.

Loved this retro birthday bus. Those railroad tracks are seriously bumpy to drive over.

I settle in for a week’s stay at the Levi Jackson State Park, one of the best sites I’ve been to yet…trees, grass, concrete pads, close to town but in the middle of the woods. Part of the Boone Trail from North Carolina, site of a settler massacre by Indians in 1786, home of a working water mill and millstone museum, and location of a Mountain Life Museum village. This will also be a good spot from which to explore bits of Kentucky’s southeast.

The park was gloriously uncrowded the day I arrived.

The onsite Mountain Life Museum invites an amble through a schoolhouse, family cabins, church, and other buildings. The blacksmith’s shop (way down there in the upper left corner) was transformed into the jailhouse for the movie The Kentuckian with Burt Lancaster.

Cat AWOLin’

Patchouli is gone. The little stinker has slipped his harness and is somewhere out in the Kentucky cornfields at the south edge of the Cave Country Campground.

I knew it the moment it happened—a big bus of a motorhome crunched past on gravel, a jerk came from the steps where Patchouli was tethered, and I got outside just in time to find his lead and harness lying flat, long, and empty on the grass, a red nylon compass pointing due south to where my frightened buddy had high-tailed it to the protection of tall grass and corn.

Two months ago, I would have freaked out. Somehow I remain calm. He’s been an indoor/outdoor cat, I remind myself. People have lost their felines at RV parks before, and they usually show up again, sometimes days later. He likes to explore, and has always been good about finding his way home by nightfall.

“OK,” I breathe. “It’s Sunday morning. I’m not due to leave until tomorrow. I can change my reservations for the next stop. I’ll stay here all week if I need to.”

I’m still worried, of course, especially that he’ll meet up with something a lot scarier than a moving RV—something big and hairy and full of hungry teeth. I alert others at the park to watch for him, showing pictures, describing what happened. All are sympathetic, but none had seen him charge off, so I really don’t know where he could be in that vast expanse of corn and grass and woods beyond the campground.

I park my hands on my hips and mutter into the corn. “Patchouli, you’d better have a really good story about your adventures out there!”

I try to busy myself in the trailer, but I can’t focus much. I go out every five minutes, walking the edge of the cornfield, crawling through shoulder-high grass, calling and shaking his container of favorite yummies.

This goes on for about an hour. My next door neighbors, meanwhile, button up their motorhome to leave, actions that I know will only keep Patchouli away from the area. Shortly after they pull out, someone knocks on my door.

It’s the lady of the pair, a little breathless from jogging from their RV, which has stopped on a road in the park. “We just saw your cat!” she says. “He’s running in the driveway, between the office and the laundry room!”

“Oh, thanks so much!” I charge to the north end of the buildings, hoping Patchouli hasn’t bee-lined it for the acres of cornfields beyond that side of the park. A guy in a golf cart is coming around the south end of the same drive, probably trying to stop Patchouli from retracing his steps, but something like a golf cart rolling on gravel is only going to make things worse. Another guy sits on the laundry room porch with a yappy dog. Great, another thing to scare my cat.

I wave down the man with the dog. “Did a brown cat just run through here?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

How could you have not seen him, I want to scream. He would have passed right in front of you! I turn back to the north end of the drive, hoping Patchouli has ducked into the cover of the flower beds nearby.

“Over here!” The lady who first spotted him is calling from her rig, pointing to somewhere beyond the buildings, the direction I’ve just come from my trailer. “He’s over there, behind the house!”

I backtrack and spot him. Patchouli has slipped through the garden. He crouches in the grass, wide-eyed and panting. I stop my run, flooded with relief, calling his name. But I’ve already startled him, and there’s no recognition for me or my voice. He bolts.

I trot after him, yelling, “Patchouli, stop!” (Hey, it’s worked before.) No good. He speeds off like a cougar chased by fire. Straight back into the corn.

Keeping my eyes on his point of entry, I find him in the fourth row from the edge. I’m worried he’ll bolt again, so I sit down outside the corn and talk to him. He’s meowing, eyes dilated, mouth panting, flopped on his side as if standing takes too much effort. He won’t come, but doesn’t seem ready to flee again.

I creep into the first row of corn—no easy feat through closely planted stalks. To my relief, he gets up and comes to me. I carry him back to the trailer, where he keeps meowing, breathing hard, heart racing. One stressed out cat. So much for a grand day out.

I stroke his ears for ten minutes, and he calms down a bit. He keeps biting at his shoulders, though, and won’t let me touch the area. He paces between me and the bedroom, but runs away when I try to examine him. I’m worried that he tangled with something nasty, and has been bitten or punctured. He abscesses easily.

I keep an eye on him, considering whether to call a vet—it’s Sunday, so only emergency groups are open. He eats, poops, but won’t drink water. Oh, great, hydrophobic. I watch him closely for signs of rabies, which I no longer vaccinate against because of vaccine problems.

Finally he stops his fretting and self-biting. Drinks water. Curls up on the bed to sleep it off. He’s back to his usual self by late afternoon. I find no marks on him at all; perhaps the shoulder biting was from his microchip, which may have become bothersome because of dehydration.

This evening he has no interest in being anywhere near the outdoors, and I’m already thinking about how he’ll spend his outside time in the future. Under an even more watchful eye, to be sure.

The Sound of Silence

On the Intro to Caving tour, the guides inspect us for proper footwear (over the ankle boots only), and we don kneepads, helmets, and headlamps supplied by the park. Our tour is full with twenty people. The oldest fellow is maybe in his sixties, the youngest around 15; most others are 20- to 35-year-olds. One man in a yellow polo shirt makes me remember that a participant’s chest or hip measurement can’t exceed 42 inches, else it’s impossible to get through a couple of spots. This guy’s barrel chest is borderline for sure.

We pile into a park bus and ride to our starting point: the New Entrance stairwell that I went down yesterday. This time I’m without my camera and our group is smaller, so I can take in the beauty of the graceful steel-step descent even more.

As an Intro, this 3-1/2 hour tour is about experiencing and learning the basics of cave exploration. Now remember, this is underground. Through rock. In the dark. And nothing about this place is regular or predictable.

Single file, we slither through the passages like a subterranean conga line, with only our bobbing headlamps for light. We crouch, baby crawl, crabwalk, tuck, duck, butt-slide, sidestep, lean, drag, pull, clamber, belly-crawl, pivot, and straddle—all the while joking, oohing, exclaiming, yelping, bonking a helmet, laughing, and keeping track of those ahead and behind so we stay together as a group and can help each other through the tricky bits.

These two miles of cave have been “sacrificed” to the Intro tour, which means thousands of boots have traversed its path. Many of the rocks are worn smooth for footholds and handgrips—great for knowing you’re probably on track, but not always easy to use to balance or haul yourself around. Good tread is useful.

(By the way, all of this is not called spelunking any more. That’s passé, old hat, gauche. Saying you’ve gone spelunking marks you as a cavern hick. It’s called caving. Verb. To cave. I cave, went caving, am a caver, like to cave. Strike all “spelunking, spelunk, spelunker, spelunked” from your lexicon if you want to be known as hip.)

This photo from yesterday’s New Entrance tour gives an idea of one of the less squeezy kinds of paths we are dealing with today. This time we have only headlamps to see by, and all of us are in slacks, boots, and gloves for crawling and clambering around rock.

At a widening in the path we sit down for a break and our guide, Cal, gives us more caving knowledge. We learn the 1-2-3-4 Rules for caving, taught in reverse order: four people minimum every time you cave; at least three sources of light per person (preferably various types and not all stored in the same place, like in a backpack that can drop down a hole); two things to tell someone before you go (where you’re going, when you’ll be back); and the one thing to do if you get separated from your group: stay in one place!

He tells us stories of people getting lost—stories I can greatly appreciate because of a particular stop we make en route. He points out a rock behind us—a big lumpish boulder lurching out above the path. “Anybody know what makes that rock special?”

We take guesses based on its possible age, geology, composition, source, likelihood of falling—all wrong. Finally someone ventures, “We’ve passed it before?”

“Yes!” says Cal. “We’ve just done a figure-eight loop and we’re right back where we started, only going the other direction.”

Yikes. And here I had been presuming we were being led down a single, uninterrupted tunnel all the time.

“Be sure to look behind you as well as ahead when you cave,” Cal warns, “to stay aware of landmarks that can tell you where you’ve already been.”

Got it.

We come to another rest point and gather into a rough circle on the rocks. The cavern is barely big enough for all of us to sit in. He checks in on how we’re doing, talks a little more, then says, “Now I want everyone to turn off your headlamps.”

Oh, goody—a chance to really sense what a cave can be like. One by one the lights wink out amid general banter. The last click on the guy’s helmet next to me drops us into darkness.

It is absolute. Absolute black, absolute nothingness. Not one particle of light to bounce off a surface and tell us that it’s there. Not even for that hand we’ve all put in front of our faces.

“You may think you can see it,” says Cal, “but that’s your mind playing tricks on you. You know your hand is there, so you think you can see it. But if I waved my hand in front of you, you’d never know it was there.”

We murmur and chatter over this concept. In the dark he tells us more about the extent of Mammoth’s caverns. “Now everyone sit very still and quiet. Get comfortable, then try not to move or make any noise.”

Everyone settles into place and stops talking. In the initial quiet, someone clears his throat, another gets more comfortable with his feet. The sounds die away, absorbed by rock and darkness. Motionlessness settles on the group.

Seconds pass. Half a minute. And the sound of no-sound comes.

Silence, when total, is physical. It has mass. Pressure. Substance. I can feel its weight on my skin and eardrums.

I tip my head slightly, striving to detect something, anything, in the swallowing dark, tuning my ears hopefully for the shush of clothing, someone’s raggedly expelled breath. But, like me, everyone else has become carefully still. If this lasted long enough, I’m sure I could count heartbeats, my own or my neighbor’s.

The silence holds. Eyes and ears have no input, no frame of reference. Only my body and inner balance tell me something of my situation: sitting on a hard surface, somewhat chilled, elbows on knees, hands clasped, surrounded by velvet-muffled blackness. But I could be anywhere, any time of day or night. Hundreds of feet underground, miles along some crack through a rock. Lost and alone in unrelenting stillness and dark.

Then Cal speaks again from the right. His voice is soft, but it’s almost an explosion after the quiet. “People who have been rescued after being lost in the caves say it’s not the darkness that gets to them. It’s the silence. People will sing, talk, drum the walls with a stone, pound rocks together—anything to stop the silence.”