Tuesday, February 11, 2014 - Carlsbad Cavern, Bigfoot and Texas

Carlsbad - what a great name, but how did it arise?  I seek Carl’s bath in vain.  Is there a spa here?  Healing waters?  This question draws quite a few blank stares and head shaking from the locals.  Amongst the normates, wheelchairs infer diminished mental capacity.  My question only confirms this prejudice.  Finally, thanks to Wikipedia, I learn that the town and the caverns take their name from a Bohemian town with hot springs visited by a holy roman emperor Charles IV in the 1300s.  I know nothing of Charles the IV save that he once bathed in Bohemia.  Did he improve hygiene in the middle ages, or simply notice the smell surrounding him?  We’ll never know.  HA!  High school German comes in handy once again.

Bad weather all week in Carlsbad, but does it matter?  We’re underground.  Rising early, we arrive at the caverns in time for the 9AM lantern tour.  A snow ice fog shrouds the parking lot.  “Yuck,” says Pearl, settling in for a long nap. 

Carlsbad houses thousands of healthy bats, as yet untouched by the white nose death fungus (white nose syndrome or WNS).  Since 2006, the disease has steadily marched west from New York, leaving millions of bats dead in its wake.  WNS arrived in

Missouri in 2013.  Before allowing us to visit the famous caverns, the park service wants to ascertain that we haven’t visited any eastern caves housing the fungus and dead bats in the past five years.  We haven’t.

While I sit in the cafeteria, sipping hot tea and writing, Bear and Bloodroot depart for the lantern tour.  On their excursion, each student spelunker receives a specially designed wooden lantern to use during the two hour ranger led tour.  Exploring a route not open to the public, the boys learn the history of the cave and hear stories of the cave.  Each person uses his lantern to illuminate the rocky path through the cavern, recreating the experience of the early cave explorers. 

The boys return for lunch.  In the early afternoon, we all descend to the main cavern.  During the summer, the wait for an elevator ride down can stretch out to two hours.  The park service has been building four additional elevators for several years now, as yet incomplete.  We presume that they hired the same moron contractor we hired, Mr. Magoo.  As we travel, we note Mr. Magoo’s fingerprints all over the place.  He sure gets around. His reputation for incompetence, chaos and mayhem must NOT precede him.

We visited Jewel Cave two years ago.  Touring that cave, I descended via elevator, circled a room around size of our kitchen and rode the elevator back up to the surface, having explored the extent of their handicap accessible space.  Thus primed, I don’t expect much from Carlsbad.

I roll into the cavern.  Wow!  The expanse before me shocks me.  Taken aback, after a moment I see that Carlsbad’s accessible trail dwarfs some entire caves I’ve visited.  We explore the Big Room and meet up with Virginia, the NPS ranger who led the boys’ tour this morning.  Virginia walks along with us, providing our own private tour of Carlsbad.  She took this job as a fluke one summer, concerned about working underground.  Her fears evaporated as she found her soul in the cavern; she has never left.

Every night from May to October, thousands of bats burst forth from the cave hunting their evening meal.  Long ago, local ranchers traced the bats to the cave.  Around 1900, a teenager named Jim White began exploring the cavern with his homemade ladder constructed of rope, wire and sticks.  He named the features and rooms near the surface.  The first rooms reveal his fear of his discovery (devils, witches, cauldrons).  Was this the pathway to hell?  Calming down, the later names become more fanciful reflecting the awe the cavern inspires (fairyland, temples of the sun, lion’s tails, brides, etc.)

Unlike most caves developing slowly as rainwater percolates through limestone, much of the Carlsbad system formed when hydrogen sulfite rich ground water mingled with rainwater.  The resultant sulfuric acid dissolved the limestone creating the massive caves while racing (geologically) ever deeper into the earth.  Over the next million years, dripping water dissolved calcium in the remaining limestone decorating the caves with long pointy stalactites (clinging tightly to the ceiling) of myriad different shapes and sizes.  The calcium laden water built stalagmites (you might trip over them) climbing upward from the floor. The water flow determines each feature’s shape. Slowly dripping water forms soda straws and stalactites.  A stalactite and stalagmite grown together become a column.  Rainwater flowing down a slanted ceiling creates curtains.  Calcium collecting around a pebble builds a pearl or popcorn, depending on mineral composition. 

Virginia shows us each sculpture on the trail, fondly naming each.  We see colors in the features.  We close our eyes while she inserts her flashlight in a cuplike feature of a stalagmite she named “the bride”.  Upon command, we open our eyes to a green glow created by her flashlight exciting the calcite molecules in the sculpture.

We also learn that the bat death white nose syndrome originated in Europe.  Curse the eternally ethnocentric American park system!   While we had not visited any eastern North American caves in the past five years, we did visit the Cro-Magnon caves in France.  Performing a quick inventory of my attire, I exhale upon realizing that not one thing I’m currently wearing had been worn in France.  I could still walk then and hadn’t yet met Sven.

Even today, the caves hold many secrets.  Last year, rangers became curious about a dark space above the Big Room.  Carefully anchoring a rope near the ceiling, they laboriously shimmied up the rope to discover another huge set of caverns.  Working in October, they named the new rooms the Halloween rooms in honor of their discovery time.

The ever patient Bloodroot tires of our companionship and decides to take the half hour trail walking out of the cave.  We arrange to meet him by Pearl.  In what seems like a very short time, Bloodroot returns to collect us.  He tells the rangers guarding the cave entrance that he’s lost his parents.  We naturally are still talking with Virginia.

We reluctantly leave the Caverns, stopping to buy some necessary souvenirs.  Keith wakes up Pearl, a bit groggy from the weather.  We drive back out to White City passing the only gas station around for miles.  “Doesn’t look open,” says Keith stepping on the gas, turning south on 180 heading toward Van Horn, Texas.  We pass last night’s hotel, never thinking to ask the employees there about closest gas station.

“Dear, how much gas do we have?” I query a bit later. 

“I don’t know how to read this gauge,” he responds.  I look and point.  Pearl has calculated her remaining gas will take us 52 miles.  We have 137 to go. 

“We’re hosed.”  We don’t have enough gas to return to the city of Carlsbad, 27 miles north of the park, or enough to reach our hotel in Texas.

“Perhaps the next national park will have a gas station near it,” says Keith brightly, ignoring the reality that Carlsbad, a much bigger park, did not.  Silently, I too hope for a gas station by the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

Pearl ascends into the Guadalupe Mountains as her gas gauge sinks toward oblivion.  Entering a gothic novel, we climb into an ice covered winter world.  The temperature drops.  A white mist descends, covering us, the mountains, the road and Pearl in secrecy and silence.  Bigfoot lurks, camouflaged by the white.  He waits with a hunter’s patience for Pearl to consume our remaining gasoline.  Once we’re truly stranded, lacking both petrol and cell phone coverage, he’ll pounce.  I pray for a quick ending.

Bloodroot spots a sign saying “Guadalupe Mountains National Park.”  We pull into the parking lot, quickly killing the engine.  Bloodroot runs to the visitor center, collecting the all-important national park stamps, making Guadalupe Mountains our first drive by stamping.

I remain in Pearl, delighting in the glorious reality of intact entrails uneaten by Bigfoot.  I check my arms, legs, torso, discovering myself intact, unbitten, unscathed.  I sigh with relief.  Exhausted by our brush with death, I have no desire to visit the ice shrouded park.  I’m sure that I hear Bigfoot, deprived of easy prey, howling outside.

Keith negotiates plaintively with the park personnel.  They reluctantly sell him two gallons of their lawn equipment’s gas for $15, no more, with three gallons we could have made it to the highway (I-10) and civilization.  He learns that the gas station by Carlsbad was open; just unattended.  “Use your credit card to start the pumps.  They’ll dispense gas.”

The park rangers give us directions to the nearest gas station, in Dell City, Texas, forty miles east.  We had been heading due south.  Gliding down out of the mountains, using as little gasoline as possible, we descend into the Texas plains.  As we drop, the snow, ice and haze diminish then disappear.  Bigfoot, the star of our gothic novel, melts into Texas’ endless plains, the plains somehow also gothic in a more cowboy way.  As we drive the hour out of the way, we begin to breathe slightly more freely. Time dilates, crawling along, while I do my best to I think of anything but the gas gauge.  (Time dilation-speed of light-theory of relativity-Einstein…)

At long last, we spot the Dell Oil gas station ahead.  The locals at the station, busy buying gas for their farming equipment, listen as Keith tells the full blown story of our escape from peril and the paucity of gas stations in this part of the country.  He gesticulates, his body displaying his angst.  “We almost ran out of gas!” he concludes.  “Yup, you can’t do that here,” a sweet Texas tinged voice responds.  (And Bear says I talk to rocks!  This woman is quite kind, not at all lithic, but he will also talk to anyone who will listen.)

We buy $60 of gasoline at Dell Oil, drive another hour back to our southbound route followed by another two hours south for good measure to our hotel in Van Horn, Texas.

After our day’s adventures, the boys express unwillingness to cook in the dark.  Not that I blame them.  We head over to the one promising looking restaurant in town, the Hotel El Capitan.  But the HOT is dark in the hotel sign, so it reads EL EL CAPITAN. 

In the 1930s, an El Paso businessman Charles Bassett constructed five similar hotels to serve the north south route tourists between Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend National Park. 

In the late 1950s, interstate 10 opened running west to east across northern Texas, taking most tourists with it.  The hotel closed to be reborn in the 1970s as a bank.  In 2007, times changed again.   Painstakingly restored, the western style hotel features exposed beams, expansive tile and woodwork, producing the feel of luxury a century past.  The bank vault remains adjacent to the dining room, now stocked with liquor.

We notice more people working in the restaurant than dining there.  Our server, Nina, moved back to Van Horn to care for her ALS afflicted father.  With her care, her father lived an additional 14 years.  I’m impressed; ALS generally kills its victims in five.  Nina, a single parent with two kids, also adopted two more children whose mother had been incarcerated.  All the children have grown up and are doing well with their lives.

I order a pistachio crusted fried steak, not realizing that a fried steak is a glorified hamburger.  Is the food particularly good?  No, but it’s real and different.  I’m in Texas.  I enjoy the food for what it is.

I do so miss the South and Southerners.  I miss complete strangers giving you sincere, heartfelt love and kindness.  People will open their lives up to you, wrap you close in their arms and enclose you in their circle of love.  I miss the politeness in the way we treat each other.  Someone once famously said, “If you can’t appeal to a Southerner’s sense of decency, you can usually appeal to their sense of politeness.” And we touch each other all the time too.  I miss women hitting me shouting “Girl!”  I do NOT miss the obscenely conservative politics intertwined with conservative religion NOR do I miss the heat.

Nina asks us if we’ve seen the reality TV show Duck Dynasty as our travels will take us to Louisiana, the dynasty’s hailing spot.  We express our unfamiliarity with the show.  Nina shares her opinion, “Bunch of rednecks acting trashy.”  “But,” she adds, “They don’t have to work anymore.”

We query Nina about the liquor in the vault.  “There’s nothing in this town to do but drink.  So we thought it best to lock the liquor up.” Ah, Southern practicality.

We find this hotel far more charming than the Taos Inn.  The El El Capitan doesn’t make a pretend past for the tourists; it breathes authenticity of a time long gone from its broken neon sign to the liquor in the vault to the down home Texan menu. 

Nina ladles out encouragement.  “Keep travelling,” she says, giving me a big hug as we part.