Going Underground

Horse Cave, Onyx Cave, Diamond Caverns, American Caverns, Outlaw Cave, Lost River Cave, Hidden River Cave, Mammoth Caverns…the Who’s Who of undergrounds in Kentucky’s “karstlands” (caves, sink holes, springs, and subterranean rivers) seems endless.

While many caves sound appealing and some are heavily advertised (their brochures and billboards bursting with exclamation points like some kind of stalactites for sentences), I decide to spend my time at Mammoth Caves National Park—a place many friends have recommended.

Admission is forever free (a stipulation of the land sale to the feds in the 1940s), but I’ll bet that far more money is made by the cave tours than could ever have been gained by entry fees. They run tours all day long, all days of the week. This park is so popular that the visitor’s center has five counters for selling tickets, with a cordoned pathway that moves the queue as well as any Disneyland ride.

Tours vary by the formations shown, miles and time covered, size of group allowed (some over a 100 people!), standard vs specialty tour, elevation change, and difficulty of maneuverability within the caverns. Most are ranger led, although one is self-guided. The carefully staggered schedules usually enable folks to catch more than one tour in the same day, sometimes three or four. Ka-ching!

The Mammoth cave system is the considered the longest continuous cave in the world, currently mapped at 365 miles of multilayered, interconnecting passageways—some big enough for a lumbering mammoth to throw its tusks around in (no, they didn’t live here), and some so narrow that cavers must push out all the air from their lungs before squeezing through.

A map of the public portion of Mammoth Caves.

The Grand Avenue, a highly popular 4.5-hour visit that goes through the main portion of the public caves and is the longest of the standard tours at 4 miles, looks mighty enticing. (The size of this part of the caverns is what gave Mammoth Caves its name).

I decide, however, on three others for my time and tour bucks: Violet City Lantern Tour (shown by lantern light only, 3 hours); New Entrance Tour (short but with some of the more spectacular crystal formations, 2 hours); and Introduction to Caving (a chance to crawl around and get really dirty, 3.5 hours). I split them up over the time I’m here; other tours and other caves will just have to wait until I’m in this area again.


Ranger-guides Alan and Liz distribute 10 kerosene lamps among 38 of us on the Violet Lantern Tour. Not everyone gets a lamp, so they stress that family units keep track of each other in the caves. A wrong turn or momentary digression to peek down another path, and…well, not good.

As the only solo traveler in the group, I ask for someone to hook in with, and I’m kindly adopted by Kathy, son Paul, and husband Bill, from a small town near Dayton, Ohio. Kathy and I spend a lot of the time in between stops chattering like old friends, and I’m sorry to say goodbye to them all when the tour is through.

Among many interesting rooms, this tour passes through a portion of cave that was once used as—get this—a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. The thinking of the day was that the constant temperature (about 54 degrees) and the caves’ natural air exchange would be good for the patients.

So hospital beds were brought in, a doctor hired, a couple of clinic buildings built deep in the tunnels. And to top it off, public cave tours continued right on through the hospital, with TB-suffering patients reaching out to visitors from their beds. Consumption as a souvenir, anyone? The dark, damp environment didn’t do much to help the TB patients, either. They died within a year.

Saltpeter filters; the mineral was collected in the 1800s to make gunpowder.

The march of the lanterns.

A TB hospital building.

The aptly named Cloud Room.

A stone of many markings, possibly acting as a guide post. A vague image of a pictograph figure is near the base of the rock.

Story and break time.

Only a light can reveal any footsteps made here.

Spent reed canes found in the caverns.

Smoke writing was a common way to leave one’s mark on ceilings.

The New Entrance Tour starts at the “newest” entrance from the surface, discovered in the 1920s (ya gotta love the imagination of the folks who named these things). Shortly after passing the doors that lock out the summer heat and lock in the cool of the caves, our afternoon group is walking down a nearly vertical crevice on a narrow, steep, steel stairway that echoes and clangs underfoot.

It took a submarine contractor to successfully build the thing—they were not allowed to alter the crevice in any way, so the stairs wind ingeniously through the rock. This spectacular descent is a little hard to take in, as the group must keep moving. But it’s amazing to stop and look up and wonder how the heck people got down to explore this cave without the stairs in the first place.

The million-dollar stairwell.

Through million-year-old rock.

The New Entrance area has more living formations than other parts of Mammoth that are open to the public. The water table dropped eons ago, leaving the upper tunnels and caverns dry. Here, however, enough water seeps down that crystals are still collecting.

Not sky: ceiling.

Part of the Frozen Niagara formation (Public Attraction Rule No. 1: name it after something already well known, and more people will come see it).

Liz turns out all the lights and uses a Bic lighter to show what it would have been like exploring the caves with a reed torch. She has us all sit very, very quietly to experience the silence…which is broken within two seconds by the echoing wail of an infant in the group. We all laugh.

Roadside Attractions

My first drive on Kentucky roads is a study in contrasts. Stay on Hwy 231, and I’m on a two-lane country road, with homes, parishes, farms, gas stations, and drive-bys through towns no bigger than three buildings and a church. The occasional stoplight and left turn. A local coffee shop. Corn and soy fields and private gardens. No shoulder for potential breakdowns, nowhere to pull off unless I could tuck 40 feet worth of rig into the widening of the road that marks the next mailbox for rural delivery.

Such pastoral beauty is a most relaxing way to drive—for passengers. As a solo traveler with 27 feet in tow, I don’t soak in much of the scenery. I need to watch the road for the next bend, avoid drifting into a ditch or oncoming farm truck, and make sure I don’t miss a turnoff as back roads intersect and careen in unexpected directions.

More than an hour on this road, and I’m ready to ditch the romance of traveling the “blue highway” (black on today’s maps) for the promise of the thick red line that marks the William H. Natcher Parkway (which is natcher-ly shortened to Natcher Pkwy by the locals).

Less than an interstate, more than a highway, Natcher Parkway is a four-lane divided road that roughly parallels 231. Two fast-moving lanes each way, a wide grass strip between, as straight as a sober crow flies. It has no number, only a name, and it’s such a long one that highway signs leading to it show only a pinched little logo—nearly indecipherable at highway speeds.

The paving is new, the shoulders are wide, and much of the stretch is tree-lined to hide the rural life beyond and keep highway noise down for the locals. Not much need for that sound-screening now, as there are only five cars at a time this late Thursday morning...and that’s counting in both directions.

Around mile 40 on the parkway, one of those orange, diamond-shaped temporary construction signs flaps in the wind at the side of the road: “K-9 Unit in Use.” Oooh, police dogs! Where, where?

Half a mile later: “All vehicles subject to search.” Oh, this could be fun.

Another half a mile: “Drug check 2 miles ahead.” Even better. I wonder how they’ll deal with a fifth wheel and a socially fraidy feline, or if I look innocent enough to just flag on through.

I travel five more miles, all the while expecting the requisite slowdown and road block, uniformed officers, rubber cones, and sniffing dogs, but no drug checkpoint materializes. I’m so disappointed!

Corn and soy fields are still prominent in Kentucky, but they aren’t as endless and rolling here. Instead they’re interrupted by woods, or share borders with tree-lined creeks and upright cliffs of gray rock. The stone is particularly structured here: near-perfect verticals, with shallow troughs marking drill holes where rock was perforated then blasted away through any hill that was in the way of a straight-line path. Rugged, regular, and very solid looking, they remind me of the basalt walls of the Dalles along the Columbia River in Oregon.

My destination is Cave City, and my RV park for the next few days, Cave Country Campground, is flanked north and south by corn fields five feet tall, with cobs still fattening and climbing on the stalk.

Cave City is not content to be just the nexus of visits to the renowned Mammoth Caves National Park. To ensure its reputation as the “Gateway to Unforgettable Adventure!” Cave City offers up a frenzy of attractions for all ages. This place is serious.

A life-size T-rex painted with black and orange tiger stripes (!?) beckons at the I-70 exit to the town. It’s for—what else?—Dinosaur World, with over 100 life-size dinosaurs posed to graze and stomp through trees. I can just make out the neck-flare of a triceratops behind the high walls every time I drive by.

Signboards line the roads to announce go-carts, riding stables, bumper boats, Hillbilly Hound Fun Park, gem mining, cave tours, Big Mike’s Mystery House, waterslides (all closed), Guntown Mountain Theme Park (“Wild West Adventure—Relive the Past!!”). Even a Kentucky Down Under (“spend the whole day in our piece of Australia!”), which one traveler I meet says is actually pretty good. Billboards entice visitors to roadside gift shops where they can buy “rocks, gem fossils, and gifts.”


Some parks are faded and frayed, some are boarded up, and most look like they simply fold up and go home after summer. I haven’t seen this much intensity about “fun and adventure” in a nature-centric area since the redwood forests of California. (And this is just in the 10-mile radius of Cave City. I haven’t even got to the region’s more erudite options, like the Corvette Museum, the Shaker Museum, the Railpark Museum, the…)

Whatever you do when you come to Cave City, bring along some kids or someone as wacky as yourself (where’s Janis when I need her!).

The town of Cave City itself, around the bend on I-70 where it crosses some seriously strut-testing railroad tracks, is a sad little place with an antique “district” comprising four shops on one block, and a satellite shop three turns away. I’m on the hunt for a particular kitchen tool from the ’40s and ’50s, so I take the last hour of the day to skip into each place that’s still open.

The biggest is a block-size mall run by a woman named Magaline, old enough to be an antique herself. She’s tall and wears a broad, deep-purple straw hat with a deep purple ribbon, purple-pink lipstick, a skirt and blouse outfit of bright purple flowers, purple jeweled bracelets and necklaces, and thick mascara. She has a startlingly husky man-voice, and calls me “darlin’” every other sentence. I comment on how lovely she looks so color coordinated, and as she leads me through her crowded aisles to search for the item I want, I stifle a giggle: no longer behind the counter, the nethermost point of her put-together outfit is revealed—a pair of hot pink, foam Crocs that look like cotton candy clogs. The effect is the equivalent of wearing fuzzy slippers with an evening gown.

Another shop, Nuttin’ Fancy, is a mishmash of “Glassware, Collectibles, Primitives, Scrubs” (scrubs?), plus an “Indian Artifacts Museum.” How’s that for a combo? The clapboard store is behind her clapboard house, with a wild-grown garden between. So many antiques, broken bits, and garden art spill around the place that it’s hard to tell where the house ends and the dusty, musty, crammed-shelf, junk-hanging-from-hooks, garage-of-an-antique-store begins.

Another small shop, much less of a jumble with tidy shelving units and ample walking room, is run by a man whose gargantuan girth makes him look much shorter than he probably is. He wears a red polo shirt and khaki slacks and talks to a fellow who seems more of a local than a customer. His shop specializes in “Early American Pattern Glass, Depression Glass, Quilts, Furniture, Primitives, Southern Folk Art Face Jugs, Griswold Cast Iron—We Also Carry Jams, Jellies, Country Hams.” The place smells like fresh air, unusual for an antique store. I comment on it, and he looks at me as if I’m weirder than a feathers on a pig.

The fourth shop I visit is a bank turned antique store. It shares a wall with another half of the shop—the owners cut through 26 inches of brick to open a doorway between the buildings. I’m delighted by the original teller counters, stained glass, and woodwork the owners preserved in the bank side, but they are covered with so many “Antiques from A to Z” that it’s impossible to really appreciate their beauty. This place is sparkling clean, not surprising for a place that caters to customers who also come here to buy jewelry for “prom, wedding, special occasions.”

Alas, my search through all these stores scares up nary a hint of the tool I’m looking for, and I go back to the RV park disappointed. I pore over the dozens of attraction brochures and coupons that await me there, and decide to focus my attention on the one thing that’s of most interest to me right now: caves.

“Lincoln Was Here”

I am walking a wooded path on the very land that the boy Abraham Lincoln helped his family clear, till, and live on. I am pondering the foundation of his boyhood home, now cast in bronze and all that’s left of the original building. I am crying over a grievous time in his youth as his life unfolds, shifting backwards and forwards through time, in a semi-musical production, “Lincoln: Upon the Altar of Freedom,” at the Lincoln Amphitheater in the state park.

I knew little, before coming to Santa Claus, IN, of what to expect from Spencer County, except that this is where Lincoln spent his “formative” years from age 7 to 21. The place where his beloved mother died of milk sickness when he was 9, and where his beloved sister died in childbirth when he was 19.

Two parks, divided by Highway 162, protect the land and document these years in what is now called Lincoln City: a state park to memorialize the general area, and a national park to memorialize his boyhood home. His mother’s and sister’s graves are in the parks. Of this place, Lincoln later said, “There I grew up.”

I am surprised to find so much of Lincoln in Indiana. It is a lesser-taught bit of Lincoln’s life, usually eclipsed by his lawyer and politician years in Illinois, and of course by his tenure in the White House. The tenderness of the years he spent here makes him far more accessible to my imagination, and I spend a lot of time just wandering around the national park, soaking up the day’s heat and the sense of history this place exudes.

Grave of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother.

Pennies tossed to the foot of the headstone.

An example of that famous split-rail fencing.

Bronzed foundation of the original home.

What a typical cabin would have looked like.

Typical farmyard.

Typical farm animal doing its typical thing.

Checkers.

Those wall pegs are actually a ladder to the loft. They work great, so long as you don’t bonk your head on the opening going up.

On a memorial trail of twelve stones taken from various places in Lincoln’s past. These are bricks from Mary Todd’s house in Lexington, KY.

The dinner part of the dinner theater was an Amish buffet supplied by Black Buggy Catering. The name conjured up more romantic imagery than this modern buggy delivered...

...but the fried chicken and pork roast was darn good food for a such large-crowd buffet.

The dinner fiddler was far more interesting to watch as shadow, but the photo came out looking like he was sawing behind a curtain.

I have no idea what a Cry Room at a theater would be for, except the obvious. The play wasn’t that sad, though. At intermission, they served free popcorn and sodas, which had everyone smiling.

A small museum at the theater focused on Lincoln’s upbringing and his role in the emancipation of slaves.

I liked the implied freedom of this break-through-the-wall tromp le oil in the museum.

One of the less campy (pardon the pun) guest photos that so many attractions snap the moment you enter. This photo (“A Matthew Brady Experience”) was offered as part of the Lincoln theater show; it turned out well and was included in my ticket price, so I kept it.

It’s All in the Name

OK, my first question: How did it get the name “Santa Claus”?

A funny story, that, as interpreted in the legal documents displayed in the Santa Claus Museum.

In January 1856, this little smudge on the Indiana map was called Santa Fe. The inhabitants wanted a post office and duly applied for one with the government. Their request was denied with a perfunctory “Choose another name” scrawled across the application. Apparently another Santa Fe had beat them to the title (in Indiana, not New Mexico).

The good folks of Santa Fe met to give their home a new and worthy name. Imagine the scene. Ten, maybe twelve, of the town’s top who-zzits gather in the church/town hall. It’s a frosty afternoon; winter holds a tight grip on frozen earth. People are bundled in coats and wraps. Their breath comes out in mist as they bandy dozens of ideas. It’s the third or fourth meeting already.

Perhaps in gratitude for their little town, they want to keep “santa” as part of the name, but names like Santa Ana, Santa Maria, and Santa Nicola just don’t seem to ring. Maybe an hour ticks by, but still no good ideas. Then someone blurts, “Santa Claus!”

Everyone laughs, murmurs, laughs some more. A thoughtful silence follows.

“I like it,” says one, blowing into his gloves.

“Mmmm,” begins the eldest, sucking on a pipe. “Yup. It might work.”

Another rubs his hands in his armpits. “My wife’s got supper, and I got horses to feed. I don’t care what we name it. Let’s just decide.”

“All in favor?” says the first.

So how ever that meeting went, the name Santa Claus sticks. Only in those times of fluid spelling rules, an “e” gets added to “Claus” on the application. This second town name is accepted, and Santa Clause, Indiana, is born. (Decades later, businesses will pay millions of dollars for a similar service of producing the perfect company name. Self-proclaimed specialists will white-board ideas for weeks, pass a short list of 50 candidates past focus groups, marketing committees, and the building janitor, and present, by an hours-long PowerPoint show and fifteen copies of a 127-page marketing analysis, the one absolutely ideal, “it captures your company’s entire essence in one never-before-seen-word” name…which is then tossed out in favor of something the marketing director’s five-year-old niece made up over her peanut butter and jelly lunch last Tuesday.)

Anyway, their home happily named, the townsfolk of Santa Clause live peaceably for a few years. But that “e” just bugs some people. In 1863, and undoubtedly after a few heated debates, the town requests to change the post office’s official spelling to “Santa Claus”—probably because that is, as everyone knows, the proper spelling on Mr. Claus’ birth certificate.

Done? Not so. In 1895, the town once again revisits the vexing issue of its spelling. This time they inexplicably change it to the one-word “Santaclaus,” perhaps in some weird premonition of the compound lexemes that would mark the heyday of software programs a hundred years later. Once again the government issues the new postmark, and the committee meetings stop.

Finally, in 1928, the local grammarians, who still wince and twitch a knee over every piece of mail addressed to the appalling one-word Santaclaus, raise their pens and put their collective dictionary down. Their town will be spelled the proper way, or not at all: “Santa Claus.” Yet another approved application goes into the government’s folder on that wiffle-waffling little town in southern Indiana, and it’s been the current spelling ever since.

But no matter how they spelled it, in the 1910s the town unwittingly and forever became the clearinghouse of all mail destined for the North Pole. Since the day the first starry-eyed child scrawled his first letter to Santa and mom posted it in the mail, all letters addressed to Santa Claus were, reasonably so, delivered here. And the town answered them. Year after year, volunteer after volunteer, even as the town itself struggled to stay alive.

For whatever reasons—dwindling population, a rural economy, the effects of WWI—in 1931, the U.S. government declared the town of Santa Claus too small to warrant its own post office, and announced they were closing it down.

They hadn’t counted on the fact that an entire nation had actually heard of the place thanks to Ripley’s Believe It or Not books: “Believe it or not, there is a Santa Claus, and he lives in Indiana!” Word got out of the government’s plan to close the jolly old elf’s post office, and unprecedented public outcry ensued. Angry parents and wailing tots. Newspaper headlines. Petitions. Moral outrage. Pleas to common decency and the future mental health of all children who still believed in Santa.

Federal officials, recognizing a political hot potato when they saw one, kept the post office open.

By then, thousands of letters addressed to “Santa Claus” were coming each year. And the count continues to grow. So until the U.S. Postal Service actually goes belly up, you can be assured that any letter you write to Santa this year will indeed reach its recipient without fail—sometimes even without postage.

An early ad campaign for Santa.

A teensy taste of Santa’s mail through the years.

This from around the 1960s, I think.

1943. I liked how polite this child was. Another letter from an older man asked Santa to send him a woman.

2005: letters (and want lists) have gone high tech.

Fashion advice from a young “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”?

Santa’s Candy Castle, a remnant of America’s “first themed park.” The elves still make really yummy caramels and hot chocolate.

Christmas year-round inside, where kids can use the Elf Network to write and send letters to Santa.

The glory days of Santa’s mailboxes...

...as fanciful as a child’s fancy...

...now replaced by a bland little steel box of government-issue design—just the thing to tantalize those little tots!

Its famous namesake aside, the Santa Claus I tour today might still be only a highway-bypassed town, with 37 people processing all that holiday mail (the entire population in the mid ’60s), had it not been for another name of more local fame—William A. Koch.

While not yet coined, the phrase “If you build it, they will come” was his working belief. His father had already opened a theme park called Santa Claus Land (later named Holiday World). The son wanted to build, from corn fields and dirt up, an entire resort town that would house hundreds of residents and draw thousands of visitors. Banks backed the idea when Koch had little more than sketches and dreams. Realtors sold waterfront homes where a lake didn’t yet exist, and people bought them sight unseen. Important new highways were directed southward to bring traffic through Spencer County (which also had the bonus of an historical Lincoln connection).

The people came.

And they still come. The Santa Claus of today, population 2,200, is replete with a man-made boating lake, golfing resort, 2,300-acre gated community, hometown bank and grocer, Rudolph RV Camp, Holiday World amusement park, and two Lincoln historical parks. Santa still receives his mail here. The region still draws thousands of vacationers. And the wolf of Holiday World still howls every 60 seconds across the town.