carries a basket of glowing coals. But the look on Rip’s face
strikes me; despite his long sleep, he’s exhausted, eyes dark with
worry, and if he could speak he’d say, What have I done?
Well, he’s survived his own mortality, nothing less. And so
he’s rewarded with the rare chance to see his place—family,
home, community—after his death, for so his twenty years’ disappearance had seemed to be. How would he be remembered?
For his kindnesses to strangers, for his gentle playfulness with
children? Psalm 31: 12, Forgotten as a dead man out of mind. To fall
asleep under the mountain is to be erased as though you had not
been. If not for the tired welcome of his ancient dog, Rip would
not be remembered at all.
What draughts do we drink to make us forget so much? The
world shifts around us; like that old man said to me once, Used
to joke you could lie down in the middle of Highway 123 on a
Saturday night and go to sleep. Look at it now. You can’t see where
you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. Rip awoke old,
safely doddering, ignored. They’d cut down the oak tree and
planted a ?agpole in its place. Slept through the Revolution.
DIAL ( 4) OBJECTIVE
(CHICKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD)
—View Scenic Points Through These Bausch & Lomb
Binoculars. 25 Cents.
We aren’t the >rst to visit this mountain, not by a long shot.
Consider the Battle of Lookout Mountain; the Battle Above, or
Within, the Clouds. See Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain
with Pictures of Life in Camp and Field, B.F. Taylor, 1872. “And
here we are pleasantly walking where sleeps an earthquake;
making each other hear where slumbers a voice that could
shake these everlasting hills,” wrote Taylor, musing in the munitions tent of the Army of the Cumberland, 1863. After the battle, he wrote, “Mission Ridge has been swept with >re and steel
as with a broom.”
Taylor’s camp imagery, vital and immediate, lets the reader in
on a world that war movies skip. He notes the tents’ “genuine
home-like air. The bit of a looking-glass hangs against the cotton wall; a handkerchief of a carpet before the bunk marks the
stepping-o= place to the land of dreams; a violin case is strung
to a convenient hook. . . . The business of living has fairly begun
again.” Can’t you see the place, clear as a stage set? So with a few
strokes here and there, we make a resting place, as if to stay
awhile. But things change quickly when the order comes to
strike camp. Overnight, “the canvas city has vanished like a
vision. On such a morning and amid such a scene I have loitered till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight,
leaving nothing behind for all that light and life but empty desolation.” Broken branches in a smoldering heap; trampled >elds
of stubble. Give it a few years and you’ll never know anything
out of the ordinary had happened here, though decades from
now some keen-eyed person might turn up a bullet casing,
maybe a coin crusted with verdigris.
Of the soldiers, Taylor wrote, “If there is a curious cave, a
queer tree, a strange rock, anywhere about, they know it . . .
home they come with specimens that would enrich a cabinet.
The most exquisite fossil buds just ready to open, beautiful
shells, rare minerals, are collected by these rough and dashing
naturalists. If you think the rank and >le have no taste and no
love for the beautiful, it is time you remembered of what material they are made.” So they might have loved the grotto of
Fairyland; so they might have created their own cabinets of wonder, proto-museums, in the lidded boxes of peacetime life.
If there is nothing new under the sun, neither is there anything new beneath the earth. Grottoes functioned as early theaters; caves have interesting backdrops and good acoustics, and
the arch over the stage in modern theaters refers to the ancient
cave shape. So, too, Fairyland Caverns is stu=ed with scenes
from childhood stories, frozen and sti=. And that light! The
glowing colors under the ultraviolet light remind me of glowworms, fox>re, and the lichens growing near Anna Ruby Falls in
north Georgia; I worked there one summer, leading hikers up
the trail in the darkness to show them how the lichens shone.
Ultraviolet light is a way for humans to see the world as some
other creatures do; it translates their vision into our own language of sight. Honeybees see patterns on ?owers that direct
them to pollen and nectar. Because these patterns show up at
lower frequencies, they are visible to bees, but not to humans.
In a rock shop I visited once, a curtained corner hid a display
case containing mineral samples. When you pressed a button,
an ultraviolet light switched on, and certain samples glowed
green and purple in the light. Once the timer ran out, you saw
the same specimens, dull and unremarkable. Ultraviolet light
let you in on their secret.
The ultraviolet light in Fairyland Caverns points toward
something larger than itself; like an anxious friend, it pokes you
in the side, whispering, Something’s not right. Things have
changed, and it feels wrong to repeat the same old stories.
Although it’s a comfort to know what comes next—Yankee
Doodle went to town / Riding on a pony—there’s a disconnect, a
break: Trinity. If you want to see something of Trinity, go to New
Mexico, where the nuclear age began. Face the explosion, the
original light that Fairyland slantwise re?ects. Yes, you could
trace it further: say the bomb started with the Curies’ radium
research, Jewish physicists on the run from Hitler; say it started
