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.”

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.