We drove from Mississippi back into Alabama a while northwest of Birmingham, and the landscape went from farmland to woodland almost immediately. A mix of pines and hardwoods. Driving through little towns like Millport and Fayette, the uptick in prosperity was so immediate and so noticeable I started looking around for a pulp mill. As in Canada, it is generally these mills that bring money into isolated rural areas.
Sure enough, we passed two or three. The whole area gleamed with civic pride. Neat police stations and new looking courthouses. Housing authority homes in every community. Little parks with fountains and war memorials. Churches everywhere of course, and they all gleamed too. Between towns, off the highway, two and three storied houses perched on large lots carved into the hillsides, with ponds and gazebos in front, pool patios and horse paddocks behind them.
Starting here, but all throughout Alabama, a lot of the houses appeared to be clad in that crazy paving style fake stone that was popular in Ireland for a while in the seventies. Here it was all a strange faded yellow colour, based on some local rock perhaps. Whatever it was, it made the houses look like a giant bear had pissed on them repeatedly.
Anyways, a cheerful juxtaposition to the poverty we had passed through in north east Mississippi. We had driven through some of the poorest districts in the USA that morning. You can know intellectually how dependence on one natural resource is a recipe for disaster in a community, but those couple of hours on the road demonstrated the before and after in a very uncomfortable way. Much to think about in rural Canada too.
After we crossed the I22, which connects Memphis to Birmingham, the landscape changed again and we were back to cattle farms and rundown little towns with Dollar General stores at each end and a church beside each pay day loan office until eventually we got to the Natural Bridge, the longest natural rock formation east of the Rockies. Apparently.
It was raining lightly as we paid our $3.50 to what looked like a family operation that had built a welcome centre in front of the pathway to the site. Often in America an individual will have bought the land surrounding a strange geological phenomenon and their family still makes a living from it. In this case, a teenage girl was tweeting furiously about something in between taking our money and advising us not to get lost on the trail. Outside, two wet, sullen looking teenage boys in camo were shoveling mud out of a patio. It must have stormed in Alabama too.
The NATURAL BRIDGE was a bridge-shaped piece of rock with iron sediments in it, so that it stayed in place when all the rock around it collapsed. It arched high over a limestone grotto. There was a path around it. Himself did the walk and I mooched around the edge trying to find something to photograph.
The interesting thing about the site was that it is in Winston County. When Alabama seceded from the Union in the events leading up to the Civil War, Winston County voted to abstain and to remain neutral. Thus attracting everyone’s ire, no doubt.
The teenagers either didn’t know anything about what happened to the peaceable folk of Winston County, or they were so pissed at having to work on Stephens’ Day they didn’t want to tell me, so we gave up and moved on to our stop for the night at Corinth Recreation Area in the WIlliam Bankhead National Forest.
It was closed.
The GPS didn’t have any suggestions.
We looked at the map.
We figured we’d push on to Cathedral Caverns State Park.
We started going uphill. The land got poor and rocky, the cattle standing in mud chewing at mouldy hay. The road got cracked and bumpy and the towns more and more ramshackle and dreary, devoid of anywhere to eat or even get a coffee. We drove through Addison. I have marked it in the map as The Arsepit of Nowhere. We were hungry and grumpy and I wanted to be anywhere but northern Alabama.
Then we suddenly emerged onto a hilltop to see a vast lake spread beneath us. Little boats were dotted all around, people fishing in the late evening sun. The road widened and sped up and as we weren’t far south of Huntsville, this looked like the city’s weekend playground. We passed marinas and hotels and cabins and Guntersville was a throbbing hub of humanity and joy compared to what we had come through.
This is why rural America amazes and delights me. You just never know what’s around the bend.
We weren’t far from the park, so we pushed on into the twilight and up a winding road through the hills above the lake and finally made the park just before nightfall. We passed a man in a truck on the way into the park. He stopped and I spotted him waving at us.
We reversed back to him. Bluegrass music was blasting from his stereo.
He was a gangly ball of energy. Hopping from foot to foot.
“We got eight inches of rain yesterday”, he yelled at us over the music. “The cave’s flooded.”
We must have looked really upset, so he said we could park overnight anyways, and maybe the water would go down some and maybe he could sneak us in a bit.
“Just go on up the hill there. There’s two trailers. One is Lemar’s. The other’s me and my wife. We all work at the cave. Park in between us. I’m going to Scotsboro. Y’all need anything?”
He tore off (to catch the liquor store as it turned out) and we found the trailers and a very grumpy Lemar who was standing in front of an enormous collection of damp Christmas inflatibles beside his trailer, and who finally agreed the ground was firm enough that we could back into a spot next to him.
“Firewood all got washed down river last night”, he said.
"You must have had a hard couple of days", I crooned.
"Ah well, Momma Nature. She's looking at us, sayin' 'who all put you on the side of this mountain anyways' I guess." He shook his head at his lot in life.
Never mind. It was a warm night. We hauled out our campchairs and I hauled out my Yellertail supply and after a while our other neighbour, the gangly enthusiast - Robert - arrived back with dry wood and beer and sausages.
Then his wife turned up and we had a right old evening talking about how we all ended up at Cathedral Cavern on 26th December 2015.
They were originally from Virginia. He had been a Marine, then had drifted a while after he left, and she had been a park ranger at Lake Okeechobee in central Florida when they met a few years ago. His daughter had bought three acres on top of the mountain we were on, and they had come up to visit, then decided to stay because a grandchild was on the way.
They worked at the cave giving tours. They had a small greenhouse behind their trailer where they grew bonsai trees. They had a chocolate labrador who was beside herself at the idea of company.
Next morning I woke early to the sound of truck doors slamming and went to the bath house and made my coffee and sat listening to the birds until Himself hauled his ass out of bed. He slowly showered and shaved and had a coffee and was in reasonable shape when Robert came back to tell us that they were going to close the gate to the Cave so if we wanted to see it we should come up now.
We upped stakes and tore up the hill.
It was a huge opening in the hillside.
I went in to the office and paid for our campsite and bought a teeshirt and then Lily the manager softened a bit and said we could go in a ways to see.
Our new friends brought us in with just a head light.
I’ve been in a lot of impressive caves around the world, including Ailwee in Ireland of course, but I’ve never been in a huge cave like this in the dark.
A Mr. Gurly bought it in the 1950s, for $4000. He moved his wife and family here and opened it as a tourist site for the new American middle class families with cars and weekends off to come visit. He went bankrupt after a while, and eventually the state took it over.
The cave goes almost the whole way through the mountain and is almost 300 feet below the surface at one point. It has the biggest stalagmite in the world, Goliath, and some impressive limestone formations and other geological aspects to it that I don’t remember because I spent the whole time they were talking to us about the cave thinking “I am in an enormous hole in the ground in the almost complete dark and he’s going to turn the light off at some point. I know he is. Don’t freak out, Don’t freak out.”
Then Robert turned the light off.
The darkness was absolute. All you could hear was the sound of water rushing through the sections of the cave further back that were flooded. The roar intensified in the absence of any light. It was cool and a little damp.
I didn’t make a sound.
Eventually he turned the light back on and led us back out to the light and the heat of the glorious motherfucking day with nothing above me but sky.
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