A Strange Word for a Strange World

The first time I was in a national park, I didn't know I was.  During that family vacation, I was elementary-school age, and I don't recall my parents every saying we were going to the "national park," or even to "the park."  Instead, we were going to see "the cave" or "Mammoth Cave."  Even though that famous cave is in a national park, I don't recall our having explored any landscape above ground (other than the gift shop and restaurant).

Mammoth Cave

I also believe it was during that family vacation that I first encountered the word "mammoth."  Today in the U.S., we rarely employ that word as an adjective, preferring "huge," "immense," or "gigantic."  Perhaps at the age I was, I had heard the word "mammoth" used as a noun to talk about woolly "mammoths" (based on the Russian name for those extinct animals first discovered in Siberia).  But I have no recollection of knowing about those creatures at that time either.  Because of my unfamiliarity with that strange word with three "m's" in it, the phrase "Mammoth Cave" did not sound like a description of the cave's size, but instead seemed to be a distinctive proper name, just like the name "Kentucky" for the state we were headed to.

Since that time of my childhood, I have been a tourist in a half-dozen other caves with less descriptive names.  What has stayed with me most in my memory is the otherworldliness of the experience.  (It has been similar to the experience of going into a dark movie theater and becoming so lost in the world of the movie that when I emerged back into daylight I had forgotten what day it was, and even what time of day.)  Some of that strangeness of caves has come from the fascinating, but in a way bizarre rock formations, often accentuated by man-made lights. More than those things, there has been the otherworldliness of actually being beneath the ground that had seemed so solid when I was above it.

Over a half-century before I entered Mammoth Cave as a boy, the early nature-writer John Burroughs (1837-1921) wrote eloquently about his own experience in that very same cave.  He emphasized the strangeness of the place by explaining how even blind people found it so:  "The blind seem as much impressed by it as those who have their sight....  They get some idea of the spaciousness when words are uttered....  When no word is spoken, the silence is of a kind never experienced on the surface of the earth, it is so profound and abysmal."

Burroughs then penetrates more deeply into the otherworldliness by pointing to its similarity to the dead being underground:  "I... said to myself, the darkness and the silence of their last resting-place is like this....  No vicissitudes of earth, no changes of seasons, no sound of storm or thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day and night, peace or war, it is all one; a world beyond the reach of change...."

Burroughs' words made me even gladder that we humans have evolved so as to be suited to living upon this green Earth's surface, not confined inside it.

~~~

If you have ever been in a cave, what was it like being there and coming back out?

(The Burroughs quotes are from Riverby [1894] by John Burroughs.)

(The photo inside Mammoth Cave is by Daniel Schwen,

 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)