Espey Cave

Sunset Overlook
Originally uploaded by FreeManWalking

In the fall of the year when the bronzed girls in golden sweaters stand under the translucent bows of the golden ginkgo as the wind sheers away an entire season of leaves in the afternoon I am tempted to stand in the sun and stare into its autumnal radiance. It is the last glow of warmth before the years settles down into the cool grey rain of winter in middle Tennessee. It isn’t a bad way to end a nice afternoon, soaking up the rays on a solid bed of golden leaves. Perhaps it was a celebration of the life that the sun represents and all the light of the world that comes with a good day.
Earlier, before the clouds had burned off, when there was still a chill to the air the girl in the golden sweater and I had made our way east across the super highway that is 70S coming out of Murfreesboro, to highway 64, then down an unmarked road I guessed was the right one, to a road that lead up onto a high ridge and then down a winding country lane to a dead end.
“Where to from here?” she asked.
“Down,” I said, pointing down the hill. We stumbled and slid down a sixty degree slope of dry fallen leaves under a canopy of oak, hickory, and maple. At the bottom of the quick but steep descent we walked down a narrow creek bed, not really knowing where we were supposed to go but having some idea of what we were looking for.
At length the narrowness of the enclosing hillsides opened up and we could see the creek was about to plunge off of a precipice. Somewhere down there, about fifty nearly vertical feet down was what we had come to see. We couldn’t see it yet but geologically it just made sense. Sliding down rocks and falling through tangled undergrowth we made it too the bottom and were greeted by the face of the bluff we’d just scrambled down. But we followed the gurgle of running water there found another, much high wall of rock but at the bottom of which was an opening roughly fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide.
This was Espey Cave and it is one of over 8,000 in Tennessee, a land of karst geology where the myriad streams cut across the open plateaus and down the hillsides, seamlessly disappearing into underground caverns where the cold gentleness of running water carves the rocks for eons leaving behind miles of small tunnels and scores of grand underground rooms. The air is damp and consistently refreshing, summer or winter; where, except the water the silence if complete and the darkness is total.
It is in these caves that creatures who have no Platonian inkling of the light of day live their lives in submerged darkness. Creatures such as the Tennessee cave salamander, cave crayfish, the [some kind of fish]. Not all species live in every cave, some are confined to only one cave in Arkansas or Tennessee but sill they hold in common their odd little lives in these subterranean worlds where the darkness has deprived them of eyesight as well as eyes and their bodies have grown translucent and pale for lack of pigmentation.
These creatures which have adapted so wonderfully to their niche environment live off the richness of bat guano, left behind by the mobile little flying mammals that reside on the walls and ceilings of the caves by day and venture into the comparative brightness of the upper world at night.
These fragile ecosystems are at the mercy of the world above as good ol’ boys throw beer cans and old refrigerators down sinkholes thinking they will one day make solid ground out of these slowly dissolving ground if only they throw in enough junk. And run off from agriculture, highways, and drainage ditches from the world above flow into these cave systems wreaking havoc on fragile ecosystems which remain hidden and unknown to most of the world as it flies by at seventy miles an hour.
We walk across gravel until the floor of the cave is only a small channel of rushing water, at which point we climb up onto a ledge and scramble farther back around a bend where the light of the upper world leaves us and we are left at the mercy of a small flashlight no bigger than my index finger. Here the cave opens up again and we continue back to a wall where the splits off to the left and right. In all this Espey Cave goes back for six miles and drops two hundred feet below the surface. But our light is already flickering.
We sit down on a flat rock and turn out the light to let it recharge. We share a cigarette in a darkness more complete that can ever be known in the upper world where even at night the stars provide a glaring degree of illumination unknown to the creatures of this underworld. This darkness is safe and anonymous, caves are good places to talk and make confessions. The cherry glow of the cigarette ash takes on a ceremonious glow in a living cave which can feel like the vaults of a great cathedral when the conversation turns to the right subjects.
Afterwards I build a small cairn on the rock where we had sat, a little shrine that will be washed away some great rain event of the oncoming winter. Then we walk out.
Back in day light we scramble up, sometimes climbing hand-over-hand but always up until we reach ground we can walk on. Up and up through old red- and yellow chinkapin oaks and yellow hickory trees.
Four hundred vertical feet later we pause at the top of the ridge and look out across the early November Tennessee landscape, breathing heavy in the crackling air. The leaves have really been coming off the trees in the past few days opening up the view across the gorges to other distant ridges. But there is still color, and heat, the golden yellows of autumn. If there is a heaven I can only imagine it is this, this all infusing light, and when we first see it maybe we’ll feel like we’ve just come out of a cave.