Spelunking on Thanksgiving
Turkey Day came, or Tofurkey Day since my daughter is a vegetarian (but not my son, thankfully). As Ellen and I thought neither of them were going to be in town we had booked a reservation at the Inn of McCormick Creek State Park, about 70 miles SW of Indy, for their Thanksgiving Day Buffet (beats cooking for just two). But Lo and Behold, both of my kids who live in Indiana - Emma and Chris - (the third one, Dan, exiled himself to LA last Summer) ended up being in town instead of joining the mad road rush, so all four of us trudged down to the Canyon Inn for some good country fare buffet, but mostly we were looking forward to enjoy the park's trails as a digestive constitutional.
The buffet was OK, but the trail afterwards was great. It was called Wolf Cave Trail after a legend of a woman who, coming back from the market with a load of butter, ended up confronted by wolves emerging from a cave, and pacifying them with the butter while she ran to safety. But at the peak of that two-mile loop was, indeed, that very cave, a real one in which you can crawl in and quickly loose yourself.
Fortunately Ellen had had the presence of mind to pack a flashlight (though my son Chris claimed he could have crawled through by the light of his i-Phone screen).
The passageway quickly narrowed both in height and width, so that we literally crawled, duck-walked, and slithered sideways, along the tapering path of a long-gone underground stream. Being almost deprived of sight (we had to pass the flashlight from hand to hand, as quickly total obscurity was the rule), other senses tend to take over; the smooth feel of the water-polished rock felt like exquisite marble to the touch, and I swear there's an unnamed sense for direction-switching, because the sharp twists and turns made us feel like we were trapped inside the bowels of some long-gone fossil. After perhaps 20 minutes of spelunking in quasi-darkness, we finally could see a vague gleam seeping through, and found the other opening of the cave, this one requiring a belly-crawl to reach the promised light. We landed in yet another one of the sinkholes for which McCormick State Park is famous, our eyes blinking in the newfound sunshine, to admire a natural bridge in the rock formation which the coursing waters of long ago had carved before escaping further downhill. Quite a sight. Then Chris, who had as usual gone far ahead, laughed loudly from afar and beckoned us to join him to the top of the hill behind us. We were less than 300 feet away from the other cave entrance! It surely had felt like at least a good half-mile, but the beast's convoluted bowels had fooled us.
Spelunking on Thanksgiving is a new activity for me, and I guess for all my companions as well. But the grins on our faces showed that it's not a bad combination.
The buffet was OK, but the trail afterwards was great. It was called Wolf Cave Trail after a legend of a woman who, coming back from the market with a load of butter, ended up confronted by wolves emerging from a cave, and pacifying them with the butter while she ran to safety. But at the peak of that two-mile loop was, indeed, that very cave, a real one in which you can crawl in and quickly loose yourself.
Fortunately Ellen had had the presence of mind to pack a flashlight (though my son Chris claimed he could have crawled through by the light of his i-Phone screen).
The passageway quickly narrowed both in height and width, so that we literally crawled, duck-walked, and slithered sideways, along the tapering path of a long-gone underground stream. Being almost deprived of sight (we had to pass the flashlight from hand to hand, as quickly total obscurity was the rule), other senses tend to take over; the smooth feel of the water-polished rock felt like exquisite marble to the touch, and I swear there's an unnamed sense for direction-switching, because the sharp twists and turns made us feel like we were trapped inside the bowels of some long-gone fossil. After perhaps 20 minutes of spelunking in quasi-darkness, we finally could see a vague gleam seeping through, and found the other opening of the cave, this one requiring a belly-crawl to reach the promised light. We landed in yet another one of the sinkholes for which McCormick State Park is famous, our eyes blinking in the newfound sunshine, to admire a natural bridge in the rock formation which the coursing waters of long ago had carved before escaping further downhill. Quite a sight. Then Chris, who had as usual gone far ahead, laughed loudly from afar and beckoned us to join him to the top of the hill behind us. We were less than 300 feet away from the other cave entrance! It surely had felt like at least a good half-mile, but the beast's convoluted bowels had fooled us.
Spelunking on Thanksgiving is a new activity for me, and I guess for all my companions as well. But the grins on our faces showed that it's not a bad combination.