We drop down. Shuffling past fake cave walls that are (spoiler!) real. We drop down. Trailing behind the bubbly, echoing facts of our tour guide. We drop down. Wandering with herds of tourists, elbows everywhere, snapping selfies.
The din in these dark chambers is not the hushed energy of mystic enigmas. This is the sound of regular modern life, complete with lit screens, thumbs and sensible footwear. The only difference is we’ve paid money to be modern underground.
Since I’m not awestruck, overtaken by a billowy force of the Epically Unknown, I reset my expectations. Luray Caverns is a for-profit location with a few “looky here’s” for many a looie-loo. Think bat cave at the zoo that nobody got around to renovating. And yet–and yet!–down past it all, in the cool, dark air, this space is full of mystery.
At ground level, you would never know. When you go, you’ll drive up to a jumble of non-mysterious buildings with no subterranean vibes. You’ll see a ropes course, a hedge maze, a museum with tchotchkes. If you’re on your way to a pumpkin patch, these make sense. But you’re headed to a natural phenomenon 400 million years in the making.
Walking through the front door feels like stepping into a mistake. A gut feeling, akin to queuing up for the wrong thing at the theme park. This is a dead end Disney knockoff where plastic domes play the part of ancient caves.
Sidebar. Suzy Izzard (professionally Eddie Izzard) has a brilliant bit about Stonehenge (“No one’s ever built a henge like it ever since!”). She imagines the site of Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, as a mystical place where the universe itself sings with furtive, purposeful, knowing eyes as only Izzard can do, “ah ahhh ah ah ohh ah…ohh ooo ahh ooo.” Stonehenge, the henge of henges, was NOT built in a non-mystical, wacky carnival place, “yah dah dah dah daa daa daa DAH! Ba dah dah! Boop doo doo doo! Woop be doo doop!” Luray above-ground is definitely giving Izzard’s second song.
So, yes, the lobby of Luray is off-putting. But Chris Issak’s warm voice is everywhere, instantly familiar, pumping through the sound system. As his voice echoes off the bathroom stalls, I smile, swooped back to middle school and scandalized by the his absurd MTV video. Why is Chris Issak’s voice here? Doesn’t matter. Here we go. Let’s do this, Luray.
“Oh iiiiiiiiiiii wanna fall in love. Oh iiiiiiiiiiii wanna fall in love.”
Underground, real water drips from the ceiling. I say real, because it’s surprising. Up in the lobby, you get the feeling you're walking into something manufactured, but this is a real deal hole made dazzling by dripping water over eons. “Drip! Fwop! Pling!” The sound of water plopping is almost surreal, tinny. How can I hear the actual sound of geological history and why does it sound like a video game? Then I track the pling to the phone in front of me. A woman hunches over her glowing device. “Drip! Fwop! Pling!” It’s an electric raindrop.
I want desperately to walk alone–uninterrupted, untethered. No group, no guide. I want a little bit of knowledge, then I want to run wild. Looking into the spooky crevices, I see there are still some dark spaces, unlit by a lighting designer. There are hidden places outside the prescribed footpath.
In the lulls between phone clicks and the chipper, scripted facts of our guide, I could imagine what it would be like to walk one summer’s night aboveground in the 1880’s and feel cool air streaming from underneath. A tiny gust, strong enough to blow out a candle. Strong enough to drive me to dig, tunnel, to explore with a gas lamp and burning curiosity. A new opening in the earth that swallows you whole.
What would it be like to find this colossal mountain range on the wrong side of the grass? In my mind’s eye, I am there without lights or a path or a guide. Without knowing. I go ahead anyway into what might lie ahead. Bears, monsters, gollums, trolls, tricksters, bones. A hole headed toward the other end of the earth. Out you pop, hurtling towards stars unknown. What then?
They say a woman fell in, hundreds and hundred and hundreds of years ago. Her bones were found on the ground of the cave. Drips drip-drip-dripping all around her, eternally. Sky growing into earth and the reverse. Stalagmites touching stalactites. Her remains were the only witness to this beauty growing unknown for beauty’s sake. Tucked away. A vast, closed-off secret. So is she. What happened to her? Who is she? Was she lonely, surrounded by all this mystery? Was it comforting? This epic presence. Something is here and it’s huge.
This place is the definition of slow. An empty, underground city built on infinite patience and sheer endurance. A reminder to keep going, slowly. Glacially slow. Tapping into the rhythms of the unknown. A hint of things untouched. Heartbeat of the universe. Another dimension. We age, we die a million times over and yet this cave is young. There is still more to do, more to grow, more to change. The cave and the woman within wait. There is time. There is still time.
In the brief window of our tour, we ogle in awe. Soon we’ll be pumping gas, grabbing snacks and driving off by the light of GPS. But here in the dark, our group—joined only by the timestamp on our ticket—is shrouded in mystery. But look at us. We are ill-prepared. Our clothes are too new. Our shorts and sneakers and hats are an affront to timelessness. At the very least, we should be wizards, goddesses, ghosts. Alas.
Our guide tells us that the oils from our hands, our very own skin, can slow and even stop the growth of mineral sculptures. Her cheery voice rings untarnished by human tragedy. It’s clear as a bell in these sacred hollows. Purity or the illusion of it. Either way, it’s comforting. Her voice is sweet and urgent, an underground bird calling out over glassy water, pooling over time.
Each of us, in our own way, is ruining this with phones and t-shirts and snide remarks. Most egregiously, our oily fingertips. Over the last hundred years, our touch tarnished the brilliant Yellow Egg. That’s what it’s called…this bright, sunny-side-up gem. Because of our touch, the ochre egg took a century to turn oyster gray. Now we’re not allowed to touch it anymore. Not for luck, not for wishes. Stop it. I’m sure the air we breathe–what we bring down from the surface–tarnishes. Our carbon dioxide, dreams, unreasonable expectations. Our false perceptions and hidden histories. We change the cave.
But, the cave changes us. If we let it. A massive stalactite column with a diameter of an overfed redwood once crashed from the ceiling during an earthquake. It had been growing for who knows how many thousands of years, emerging in a slow growth forest of its own. Who heard it fall? The column fell alone but for one woman and the incessant drip, drip, drip of water. It looks exactly like the felled trees we saw this morning in Shenandoah National Park under the soaring peregrine falcons.
As we roam these dim paths, we see areas that are older. Deader. Inactive. No more dripping or growing. Others are alive with slow-dripping water. Still malleable. Becoming. Out of the blue over eons. As I space out, lost in deep time, actual water drips onto my head. Not the pling of a phone. My eyes widen in the dark. The wet flow state of these shapes scream, “life!” The whole cavern calls out, “magic space, people!”
Sidebar again! Let’s take a tour with choreographer Tere O’Connor and the idea of “magic space.” He once explained the purpose of the very beginning of a performance. Before a show, people shuffle in from their lives, daily agonies and histories. They don’t turn off their phones. They’re still fighting with their day. But then the house lights go off. The stage lights come up. The first few minutes of a dance, O’Connor says, are a palate cleanser. A hello! Now you’re in a new land, with new rules and new gravity. The purpose of the beginning is to say this–this right now–is “magic space, people.” We’ve dropped down into the unknowable. Now we can begin.
Hiking down, I’ve settled. I’ve forgotten my phone and jokes and clothes and time. It is indeed magic. This place is the world’s slowest slow dance. And we are witnesses. How many drips fall while I’m in here? It takes–what?–hundred of thousands of millions of years for the stalactites to touch the stalagmites and create one unified column. They peer across the distance for a long time before they touch.
“Wait for me, my love! See you in 20,000 years! Save a spot for me!”
The longevity. The power. The ghostliness.
Where in “real life” do you witness this kind of slow growth? Here underground it’s all growth and no decay. Pushing, yielding, melding, molding. An artist’s work. The weird extravagant eeriness of it all. Intricate overgrowth. Cathedrals. Cliff sides. In the textured curves, I see muscle and bone. Our own support system is down here–femurs, forearms, ribs. Beards, eyes, teeth. In the rock, these human-esque faces take millions of years to express emotions.
I. Feel. Rage. I. Feel. Glee. I. Feel. Alone.
The names of the cave structures evoke mysteries. Titania’s Veil suggests snail-paced, puckish mischief. Plato’s Ghost howls, “whooooooooo?” Was it Plato who wrote about the shadows on the cave walls? What really is real? Unreal?
I want to wander by myself. To awe and oooh alone. To look forever at the shallow strangeness of Dream Lake. Peering into the mirrored water, I see everything reflected. Elaborate ceilings. Endless depth, the slow velocity. The lake and her lady call, “Dive in. Stay. Drown. Deeply go where no one has gone before.”
But I was not alone. I hear a splash and another phone blip. And then I catch myself cracking crass jokes. It’s all sacred and profane, holy and ridiculous, one right next to the other. My wonder is no greater or smaller than the woman with the blips. We are all worthy of awe.
I take it all in, standing taller in my time-built body. I stand with my majestic tour group, in our tacky pants and hats. All of us look and look with mysterious, light-filled eyes. We wonder alone, together. Here we are, dropping down.
This essay first took shape 10 years ago when Tim and I took a trip to Shenandoah and Luray Caverns. Back then, in the stone age of phones, some of us (ahem, blip woman) didn’t realize we could turn off the sound. We–the collective we of humankind–didn’t know we could snap a photo without the snap. These days, many of us have probably found the silence button, but our phone’s grip on us is more powerful than ever. Now instead of a world of noises where we irritate each other together, we are in a world of earbuds and a different kind of silence. Not the silence of solitude and wonder, but the silence of shutting off the world. The silence of numbing. Editing this, so many years later, I’m thinking about communal experiences of awe. I miss “magic space, people.” I miss sitting in the dark with other humans, waiting for the show to start. And I want to find my way back to Luray. I can’t wait to shuffle these weird cave-y halls with my kid. To see the reflections in the still, still water that’s still, still there.
Where are the places that we–the collective we of humankind–go together to be moved, to be awed? Are we going there enough?
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