Orion Magazine - January-February 2009

TO ESCAPE TEMPORARY BLINDNESS,
BURY YOUR FACE IN YOUR ARMS

— SURVIVAL UNDER ATOMIC ATTACK, O;cial U.S. Government Booklet, 1950

Fairyland Caverns is a grotto, of course, and a grotto is a place with a long history. Ancient Greeks worshipped caves, the water ?owing through them, and the nymphs associated with water. The >rst grottoes were naturally occurring caves, but in time people dug caves out of rock, expanded existing caves, and heightened the e=ect of water sources by installing pipes that spurted water on the unwary. The practice of building grottoes was revived in Italy during the Renaissance, when wonderful things such as water organs—pipe organs played by falling water—were invented. Artists embellished cave walls with bas-relief; they arranged shells, mineral specimens, and chips of glass in swirling mosaics. If there were no natural stalagmites, they made their own, dripping cement into elaborate towers. If there were no nearby beachcombing sites, they imported shells from the West Indies. Those with enough money created spaces where the natural world was represented in abundance. They entered, perhaps, through the carven mouth of an ogre, his forehead inscribed with “Ogni pensiero vo,” every thought flies. These were places to dawdle, shilly-shally; places to dream.

As in a traditional grotto, part of Fairyland Caverns is natural, and part is man-made. There are mechanical elements—piped music, rotating water wheels, sailors gone to sea in a yawing washtub. And, as traditionally, water is a key feature from the >rst fountain to the >nal room where a stream tumbles over quartz in a four-stepped water stair, catena d’acqua. Minerals line the walls, the ceiling bristles with coral, and the pool glitters with wishing pennies.

Leaving Diamond Corridor, make your slow way through the caverns, pausing here and there for a look at the dioramas through round portals cut in plywood. She had been expert, Jessie Sanders, at creating the look of real surprise. Had sculpted dozens of >gures for Fairyland: miners, Santa’s helpers, bootleggers, skaters ?oating on a ?annel-rimmed pond. Bears chase Goldilocks, but their hearts aren’t in it. Dwarfs cluster with squirrels and rabbits, Snow White poses in a pretty glen, and the faint strains of “Rock-a-bye Baby” >lter in from somewhere. Hansel and Gretel approach a sad-looking Witch too tired to be sinister, just an old woman getting home after a long shift. Her cottage’s peppermint-stick pillars tilt out-of-true. Not much, but it’s paid for, she seems to say, trudging heavily toward the kids, their hands already out.

I’d remembered Diamond Corridor but forgotten the dioramas inside, how they >ddle with dimension, tautly foreshortening

or stretching out into delirious long shots; how the gnomes’ jaws and cheekbones jut sharply, shiny with lacquer. How their beards gleam in the ultraviolet light, tights shimmering. Fairyland Caverns opened in 1947, and the ultraviolet light there carries a hint of radioactive threat. Everyday things— teeth, white t-shirts—glow under it.

In July 1945, scientists exploded the >rst atomic bomb in remote New Mexico. I imagine Jessie Sanders working on her sculptures during the Trinity test, dipping her brush in pots of ?uorescent paint as scientists half a continent away calculated what the fallout might be, the half-life of plutonium, where the winds might carry the particles. Some of those particles rained down on a rancher—nobody knew he lived where he did. Of the fallout he said, It smelled funny.

Here’s a scene from “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving’s version of the ancient story. Unhappy at home, Rip escapes to the woods with his ri?e and his dog. High in the mountains he meets a group of strange, silent men, bowling and boozing. They stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze, that his heart turned within him and his knees smote together. When they look away he sneaks draughts of their powerful wine, waking in the morning to >nd his ri?e rusty and his dog vanished: twenty years lost. He returns to his town, a place gone strange; when he insists, I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, folks just laugh.