mammoth cave, kentucky, redux
Of course I haven't been able to think of anything but caves these few weeks (note to future readers: a small group of young boys and their young soccer coach have been trapped in a cave in Thailand for several weeks and their painstaking extraction from the earth--massively covered by CNN, the station which can hardly believe their luck in finding a story where the banner "Breaking News" actually qualifies, and coordinated by fields of divers and engineers from various countries--has been on the minds of most sentient beings), but I couldn't imagine how I could write anything about this because contemplating the thoughts of anyone actually involved in the story fills me with abject terror, my heart begins to race and my breath catches, followed by guilt because who am I to have a single feeling at all on this, barely having contemplated Thailand before, and more than six degrees of separation from anyone even remotely connected to this human drama, but then my dear friend reminded me that to the day, one year ago, I had written an entry about Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky.
First of all, a year ago, I had no idea that I would be alive right now, so past self, I welcome you to this moment with glee and joy. Second of all, upon perusing last year's cave entry, I see that I did not write about Floyd Collins, and the comparisons are too much for me to eschew caves today.
The Kentucky Cave Wars, which took place after WWI, pitted cave explorers and cave owners against one another in a bitter kind of competition to locate and then commercially exploit caves for profit from tourists. The saga of Floyd Collins is a kind of premonition, a foreshadowing across time, for the way the story of the Thai soccer players has already held up to the 24-hour news cycle. In 1925, Collins was trying to find a new entrance to Crystal Cave, a cave he had discovered on his family's land eight years earlier, when he became trapped in a narrow crawlway, 55 feet below the ground. His friends found him the next day, and were able to send him food and run electric lighting to him. The failed rescue operation to save Floyd Collins became one of the first worldwide media sensations because it was reported using the new technology of broadcast radio.
William Burke "Skeets" Miller would win a Pulitzer for his coverage of the rescue efforts. The reporter played a role in the failed rescue attempt, and his reports were distributed by telegraph and printed by newspapers and then on the new medium of radio. Shortly after the media arrived on the scene, crowds of tourists flocked to the site, at one point, numbering in the tens of thousands. Vendors sold food and souvenirs. Four days after Floyd was found, a rock collapse closed the entrance passageway, stranding him in the cave, alone, except for voice contact, for the two weeks it took for him to die of thirst, hunger and exposure. Three days after his death, a rescue shaft reached him, and his body was recovered two months later.
His family buried him on the burial ground of the Collins' family farm, but in 1927, Floyd's father sold the homestead and Crystal Cave, and the new owner put Collins' body in a glass-topped coffin and exhibited it in Crystal Cave. In 1929, the body was stolen, and although later recovered in a nearby field, the injured left leg was not. After that, the coffin was kept in a secluded part of the cave, in a chained casket. The Collins family had originally objected to the macabre display, as one might expect, but it was not until 1989 that the National Park Service re-interred Collins at the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church Cemetery. Let's keep in mind that I visited Mammoth Cave in the company of my father and siblings many years before the body was appropriately buried, not that again, any of this is about me. I remember being horrified by the story of Collins, but I was unaware of the coffin, thank goodness.
Unknown before the strange and terrible circumstances of his death, Collins' tombstone reads "Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known." His death inspired the award-winning musical Floyd Collins, which opened off-Broadway in the 1990s, for a run of 25 nights, before touring nationally and internationally. Floyd Collins is mentioned in Mark Danielewski's postmodern novel, House of Leaves, beloved by my son Cameron.
We don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Chilean mining accident, which trapped 33 men in a cave for 69 days in 2010, and would hardly think at all of Jessica McClure, the 18-month old little girl who fell into a well in Texas and was trapped for 58 hours, were it not, perhaps, for the Simpsons episode based on the incident which turns up in reruns. The workers attempting to free Jessica were reassured by the sound of her singing the Winnie the Pooh song; Ronald Reagan said that "everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on." CNN covered the McClure rescue as it did the Chilean mining accident as it did the rescue of the Thai soccer team.
I saw an accusatory posting on Facebook suggesting that the intense interest in the Thai soccer team comes at the cost of less interest in the humanitarian tragedy in which our country is taking immigrant children from their parents--from the absurd horror of children without their parents in immigration court, in cages, alone. Both narratives induce a kind of panic in me that all the donations in the world can't soothe. The money we give to Raices Action Network, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services in Texas helps, but how do we stop the steady drumbeat decay of our country?
Of course, our country isn't subject to any one narrative. The way we are treating the children of people coming to this country in search of an impossible dream, is simply a brightly colored thread in the larger historical pattern of treating black and brown people as other. And yet, many of us are in mourning right now for the way the political landscape has forced a reckoning, and for the many many ways in which we are coming up tragically short. Even admitting that I don't know how to participate fully, that I don't have the right words of atonement, of change, is to make myself vulnerable. I think we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
It's quite a trick right now, maintaining perspective. Up close, I am tethered to my body, riddled with cancer and yet defiantly buoyant, for the moment, for the grateful moment. Like those kaleidoscope viewers, a flick of the screen puts me at the edge of a cave in Thailand, another flick and a detention center in Brownsville, Texas. It's hard to imagine the musical. It's easy to imagine the Pulitzers for reporting.
Poor Floyd Collins. Alone and dying in a cave, far from his family, whoever his beloved was, whoever knew his more secret self, whoever looked at Floyd with intimacy and love. The words floating up from the earth and then slowly stopping. CNN tried to stir emotions with the messages from the soccer team--we want fried chicken, they begged, we want to see the World Cup. While we on the surface of the earth wrung our hands about the dead Navy Seal and tsk-tsked about young coaches who take their children spelunking.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance unexpectedly went South for vacation, instead of decamping to the Vineyard. From the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, his photos read: Mary Turner was lynched, with her unborn child, at Folsom Bridge at the Brooks-Lowndes County line in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the recent lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner. Or read: Robert Mallard, a prosperous farmer, was lynched near Lyons, Georgia, in 1948 for voting.
The Great Migration was the migration stream which took six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of Mary Turner's lynching through the 1970s. As Isabel Wilkerson says, "it stands out because this was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens."
We are dishonest about the story of our country every day, but there is a transcendent idea there, one we keep falling short of, but one we mourn nonetheless. My mind is muddled with worry, for Thai school children, for immigrant toddlers, for the children out in the summer in the cities of the North right now who aren't toggling between camp and vacation homes. But there is another story line here--a story about ninety divers coming together from different countries on a mission to save some children, or a story about the outpouring of money and sorrow that started to change the story being told at our borders, but just, or a story about knowing that something is not right at all, and refusing to to take solace in the comfort of our own homes, in the company of our own darling, breathing, thriving children.
Isabel Wilkerson's book is The Warmth of Other Suns and the title is fitting on this day when the last child in Thailand has left the cave and come up out of the earth that swallowed him whole, and into the sunlight. Richard Wright said
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South to transplant it in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps, to bloom."
I am not telling you what to do. I don't know what to do.
First of all, a year ago, I had no idea that I would be alive right now, so past self, I welcome you to this moment with glee and joy. Second of all, upon perusing last year's cave entry, I see that I did not write about Floyd Collins, and the comparisons are too much for me to eschew caves today.
The Kentucky Cave Wars, which took place after WWI, pitted cave explorers and cave owners against one another in a bitter kind of competition to locate and then commercially exploit caves for profit from tourists. The saga of Floyd Collins is a kind of premonition, a foreshadowing across time, for the way the story of the Thai soccer players has already held up to the 24-hour news cycle. In 1925, Collins was trying to find a new entrance to Crystal Cave, a cave he had discovered on his family's land eight years earlier, when he became trapped in a narrow crawlway, 55 feet below the ground. His friends found him the next day, and were able to send him food and run electric lighting to him. The failed rescue operation to save Floyd Collins became one of the first worldwide media sensations because it was reported using the new technology of broadcast radio.
William Burke "Skeets" Miller would win a Pulitzer for his coverage of the rescue efforts. The reporter played a role in the failed rescue attempt, and his reports were distributed by telegraph and printed by newspapers and then on the new medium of radio. Shortly after the media arrived on the scene, crowds of tourists flocked to the site, at one point, numbering in the tens of thousands. Vendors sold food and souvenirs. Four days after Floyd was found, a rock collapse closed the entrance passageway, stranding him in the cave, alone, except for voice contact, for the two weeks it took for him to die of thirst, hunger and exposure. Three days after his death, a rescue shaft reached him, and his body was recovered two months later.
His family buried him on the burial ground of the Collins' family farm, but in 1927, Floyd's father sold the homestead and Crystal Cave, and the new owner put Collins' body in a glass-topped coffin and exhibited it in Crystal Cave. In 1929, the body was stolen, and although later recovered in a nearby field, the injured left leg was not. After that, the coffin was kept in a secluded part of the cave, in a chained casket. The Collins family had originally objected to the macabre display, as one might expect, but it was not until 1989 that the National Park Service re-interred Collins at the Mammoth Cave Baptist Church Cemetery. Let's keep in mind that I visited Mammoth Cave in the company of my father and siblings many years before the body was appropriately buried, not that again, any of this is about me. I remember being horrified by the story of Collins, but I was unaware of the coffin, thank goodness.
Unknown before the strange and terrible circumstances of his death, Collins' tombstone reads "Greatest Cave Explorer Ever Known." His death inspired the award-winning musical Floyd Collins, which opened off-Broadway in the 1990s, for a run of 25 nights, before touring nationally and internationally. Floyd Collins is mentioned in Mark Danielewski's postmodern novel, House of Leaves, beloved by my son Cameron.
We don't spend a lot of time thinking about the Chilean mining accident, which trapped 33 men in a cave for 69 days in 2010, and would hardly think at all of Jessica McClure, the 18-month old little girl who fell into a well in Texas and was trapped for 58 hours, were it not, perhaps, for the Simpsons episode based on the incident which turns up in reruns. The workers attempting to free Jessica were reassured by the sound of her singing the Winnie the Pooh song; Ronald Reagan said that "everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on." CNN covered the McClure rescue as it did the Chilean mining accident as it did the rescue of the Thai soccer team.
I saw an accusatory posting on Facebook suggesting that the intense interest in the Thai soccer team comes at the cost of less interest in the humanitarian tragedy in which our country is taking immigrant children from their parents--from the absurd horror of children without their parents in immigration court, in cages, alone. Both narratives induce a kind of panic in me that all the donations in the world can't soothe. The money we give to Raices Action Network, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services in Texas helps, but how do we stop the steady drumbeat decay of our country?
Of course, our country isn't subject to any one narrative. The way we are treating the children of people coming to this country in search of an impossible dream, is simply a brightly colored thread in the larger historical pattern of treating black and brown people as other. And yet, many of us are in mourning right now for the way the political landscape has forced a reckoning, and for the many many ways in which we are coming up tragically short. Even admitting that I don't know how to participate fully, that I don't have the right words of atonement, of change, is to make myself vulnerable. I think we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
It's quite a trick right now, maintaining perspective. Up close, I am tethered to my body, riddled with cancer and yet defiantly buoyant, for the moment, for the grateful moment. Like those kaleidoscope viewers, a flick of the screen puts me at the edge of a cave in Thailand, another flick and a detention center in Brownsville, Texas. It's hard to imagine the musical. It's easy to imagine the Pulitzers for reporting.
Poor Floyd Collins. Alone and dying in a cave, far from his family, whoever his beloved was, whoever knew his more secret self, whoever looked at Floyd with intimacy and love. The words floating up from the earth and then slowly stopping. CNN tried to stir emotions with the messages from the soccer team--we want fried chicken, they begged, we want to see the World Cup. While we on the surface of the earth wrung our hands about the dead Navy Seal and tsk-tsked about young coaches who take their children spelunking.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance unexpectedly went South for vacation, instead of decamping to the Vineyard. From the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, his photos read: Mary Turner was lynched, with her unborn child, at Folsom Bridge at the Brooks-Lowndes County line in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the recent lynching of her husband, Hayes Turner. Or read: Robert Mallard, a prosperous farmer, was lynched near Lyons, Georgia, in 1948 for voting.
The Great Migration was the migration stream which took six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of Mary Turner's lynching through the 1970s. As Isabel Wilkerson says, "it stands out because this was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens."
We are dishonest about the story of our country every day, but there is a transcendent idea there, one we keep falling short of, but one we mourn nonetheless. My mind is muddled with worry, for Thai school children, for immigrant toddlers, for the children out in the summer in the cities of the North right now who aren't toggling between camp and vacation homes. But there is another story line here--a story about ninety divers coming together from different countries on a mission to save some children, or a story about the outpouring of money and sorrow that started to change the story being told at our borders, but just, or a story about knowing that something is not right at all, and refusing to to take solace in the comfort of our own homes, in the company of our own darling, breathing, thriving children.
Isabel Wilkerson's book is The Warmth of Other Suns and the title is fitting on this day when the last child in Thailand has left the cave and come up out of the earth that swallowed him whole, and into the sunlight. Richard Wright said
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South to transplant it in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns and perhaps, to bloom."
I am not telling you what to do. I don't know what to do.
Comments
Post a Comment