What was I thinking? I’m both acrophobic and claustrophobic, yet I went and signed up for a caving outing to Tumbling Rock Cave near Scottsboro, AL. On Dec 28th, I headed out to meet two of my WNG friends for the ride over to Scottsboro where we met seven other WNG members for six-hour hike into Tumbling Rock Cave, site of a 396-foot underground waterfall.
It was a chilly day, and those of us who had never caved before were surprised when some of our group gathered outside the cave in t-shirts. We had been told to wear layers, and most of us had. Only inside the cave did we newbies understand the wisdom of suffering some initial discomfort in order to travel lighter for the duration of the hike. Scrambling up rocks, sliding down, climbing through tight spaces on hands and knees, it wasn’t long before we were working up a sweat. The layers came off, and by the time we stopped for lunch, most of us were in shirt sleeves.
It was an eerie and phantasmagorical environment. Getting photos in someplace so dark and so vast with such unpredictable and irregular sources of reflection was a challenge. We got lost only once on the way out.
Looking at my own pictures, I can’t believe I really did some of the things I clearly did. I can’t explain the impulse to make this trip, and I’m not going to become a dedicated caver--I might do it again sometime, but caving was not, for me, like snorkeling or whitewater rafting, where my reaction was an immediate “Wow!! When can we do this again?”--but the experience was exhilarating; the “Wow!” was there, but the “When can we do this again?” was not immediate. I believe this choice was about awakening myself, prodding myself, pushing beyond my boundaries. I remember a poem--I think it was by Elizabeth Barrett Browning--in which the narrator has just suffered through a particularly enervating dinner party. As she makes her escape into the cold winter night, she stops on the steps and presses the flesh of her open palm onto the spiked tip of an iron fence railing in order to feel the pain, just to reassure herself that she is still alive. I think caving is my pointed fence tip.
One element of the trip I couldn’t quite integrate, as evidenced by my awkward placement of it in this narrative, was Scottsboro’s history in the Civil Rights Movement, the famous 1931 trial of the “Scottsboro Boys.” None of my hiking companions, at least none of those I asked, had ever heard of the Scottsboro Boys, and I decided against the urge to educate them, to serve as the public memory my companions did not have. As a child of the American South myself, I’ve often wondered how long a place must be saddled with the sins of its past.
For photos of our hike,
click here. Photos can be viewed as a slideshow by double-clicking the first photo in the album and then using the arrow buttons at the top of the page to move through the album.
