A Visit to Cumberland Caverns

So today we made an outing to McMinnville, Tennessee and toured the Cumberland Caverns.  Discovered around 1810 this cave network runs for some 27 miles!  Much of that is not open to the public and is left alone for preservation reasons.  We’ll touch on that again as we go.

As the story goes, a guy name Higgenbotham found two entrances to the network while surveying the property for the owners.  The second entrance is about a mile and a half from where we entered today.  Apparently he found it, dropped his knapsack outside and went exploring with two candles (ok and some matches).  Well into the cave, climbing over a boulder holding a lit candle in his mouth something scared him.  He dropped the candle into a crevice.  In the course of lighting the second candle he dropped it too.

Three days later some friends, having found his knapsack, went in looking for him.  His hair, previously black, had turned white.  Cool story huh?  I do believe it to be true.  All the same it sounds a bit like Tom and Becky (Mark Twain)  lost in the cave, or, Andy and Helen (Andy Griffith).  I couldn’t find a short version of the latter but the “rescue” here comes around 22 minutes.  You should watch the entire thing though.

I think what makes Higgenbotham’s  story believable is the absence of a heroine dumb enough to go into a cave with a guy (period).  That, and the candle thing.  As a friend of mine so often says when the unbelievable turns out to be true, “You can’t make this stuff * up.” **

So here is the entrance we used today.  We took the short and pretty easy one hour or so walking tour.  About a mile and a half round trip.

For this tour they have pretty much made a nice walking path.  No crawling through the mud or whatever.  It is most impressive.  Some of the rooms are just HUGE.  And there are a lot of formations there.  There are other tours that are a lot longer and go a lot deeper into the cave and take a lot more effort.

About 10 minutes in we came across an area where a lot of the cool stuff that took like a thousand years to form have been broken by…well…these jerks.  They even carved their name on the wall to further document that they were jerks. When the guide first said the name of the school that had sent its emissaries to inflict such destruction I perked up.

I have an old friend who, some 70 or so years after this bunch of idiots were at the cave, went to this same school.  He loathes it so deeply that he refuses even to utter its name, referring to it always as “The Place That Shall Not Be Named.” *** His stories of it include heroin-addicted science teachers, English teachers preying on female students, Jewish teachers being fired for being Jewish, and on and on.  I don’t know if any of it is true, but he is still hot about it!  He told me once he has PTSD, or, Post Traumatic School Syndrome.  The place is some supposedly high-end Preparatory School, and it may be (high-end) for all I know.  But his counter to that is that if it was such a great source of learning they’d have given him a vocabulary that allowed him to express how much he hates the place.  ****

But we digress.

Ok…really…I just thought, you know, “What are the odds?”  

So anyway another cool thing here is that they do concerts in the cave.  Really! Here’s the “concert hall.”  It was hard to get a good picture but they seat like 600 people.  Our guide said the acoustics are simply incredible.

So that’s it.  I highly recommend it.  I may go back and take one of the longer “have to wear a helmet” tours if I can be assured someone like Barney is there to rescue me.  But the wife says no, she ain’t going in with me unless its for a concert.  Here’s the upcoming performances!

https://cumberlandcaverns.com/live/

 

* “Stuff” – you know.

** YCMTSU – I was going to have some bracelets made with this but the “WWJD” crowd thought it sacrilegious or something.  So I got some T-shirts made that said “Life of Brian Rocks.”  Those didn’t sell too well though.

*** TPTSNBN

**** YCMTSU