Caving and Driving

Actually the people here are friendly and very helpful. Hard to find anyone without a sunny disposition really. Harder to believe that these people, or their antecedents actually, were shooting at each other during the civil war. Nowhere was the phrase "brother against brother" truer than in West Virginia. Perhaps their current bon homie is a slight over compensation for bad blood long buried.

We returned to the campground and set up the tent again. We spent a while talking about the days events, concentrating on my fall on "Ye Gods" for a while and trying to second guess the state of my lead head. We'll know soon enough I thought. At 9 pm I walked over to the store and called Leila. She wasn't home, so I left a message. Leon called up Tamara and talked with her for a while.

That night I dreamed of bivvying on the streets of Seattle, stealing pre-Victorian fold-up furniture from a hotel and being accused of car accidents I wasn't involved in. The brain is a bizarre place.

Seneca Rocks (West Virginia), Saturday March 24 (741.4 miles)

Another gorgeously bright, yet freezing cold, Seneca morning. The sun blazed over the south peak like the enormous nuclear conflagration that it, in fact, actually is. After showering I returned to heckle Leon awake. Over a breakfast of tea and bagels we watched bemusedly as a youth group played some sort of weird circle game before trooping off to play on the west face.

Overhead a heavy dark cloud raced eastward. Then all of a sudden we experienced a brief rain of … well, rain … out of an apparently blue sky. That speed cloud must have dropped it on us. It did leave us scratching our heads for a bit though. The sky was mostly uncluttered at the time.

However, in the space of five minutes, at the car park it started to cloud up and rain again. To top it off I managed to lock the keys in the Cherokee. After enquiries made at the local climbing supply shop and then at Harper's, we were rescued by a local fire & rescue volunteer. Using a piece of bent wire that suspiciously resembled nothing more than a tortured coat hanger he made short work of opening the Cherokee. Mentally making the observation that car manufacturers know zip about locks, I also made a contribution to his rescue organization for his trouble. With any luck he'll use it to by a case of beer.

During our time with this fellow, John Manly, he told me that last year he had been called to the Rocks for rescue and body retrieval six times. Body retrieval? I had enquired gingerly. Yep, he had said, some guy had climbed to the top of north peak and then decided to use a gravity-assisted descent. Suicide. Ugly business that, especially as nearly a week passed before someone found the body. The other five were just rescues of stuck or injured people, not all of them climbers in the strictest sense.

The rain was a light but steady promise of misery. So we ditched our climbing plans and decided to go gawp at nearby Seneca Caverns instead. This, although lowbrow and cheesy, was a lot of fun. The old lady who guided us around said "It just amazes me …" about a thousand times, she got amazed by a lot of stuff. At one point she highlighted a vast stone balanced above us and said "if that were to fall down here we couldn't be buried deeper for cheaper." Classic. It is a shame though how the caves had been sanitized, and had suffered, for the sake of visitors like ourselves. Concrete paths lay everywhere, there was the obvious ruination of all delicate formations that lay within reach of the thoughtless, the widening of once narrow gaps to allow the more generously framed individual passage. Still, when the people here started this sort of thing back around the early 1900's it probably never occurred to them that the caves were anything more than a marketable curiosity. The lady laughingly told us some of the atrocities wrought by children and parents alike; honestly it made your blood boil.

The tiny bats hanging from the ceiling remained unmoved by our passing, ignoring the blinding light of the woman's torch, as she insisted on illuminating each and every bloody one of the poor little buggers and remarking, "look … there's another one."

It was like we had forgotten what the last one had looked like.

She was also the cook for Seneca Caverns' restaurant, so we felt obliged to stick around for lunch. The constant light drizzle was still putting our climbing plans on hold. So Leon and I indulged in a little ecological discussion. By the time we had finished our fries there was agreement on the basic principals behind the third world's current inability to contribute towards a long-term solution for saving the planet. Unfortunately we had divergent ideas of where things could or should be heading, so we dropped the subject and drove back to Seneca Rocks.

When we got back we went and sat in the Visitor Center to determine our intentions. It was still raining. With Leon's copy of "Rock and Road" we decided that maybe we could squeak in a visit to Red River Gorge. It was about 50 miles out of our way. Back in the truck we got and back on the road.

Leon had left his wallet and jacket in the visitor center but we wouldn't realize it for another 200 miles.

West Virginia is pretty mountainous. Not really big ones, just a lot of them, and we drove through some places where it was still snowing. The western part of the state seemed flatter and more urbanized, but that might have been because we had reached the Interstate highway.

Kentucky, where we stopped to get gas and discovered that Leon's wallet and jacket where missing, was most definitely flat. At least along the I-64 it is. We also discovered that Red River Gorge was too far away after all, our mileage didn't allow for the extra distance. With Leon a bit unhappy about losing his stuff (he was unable to contact the visitor center) and the weather still not looking great, we resolved to just continue west. I drove pretty much all of the way through Kentucky, stopping just over the state line for food at Edwardsville, Indiana.

Here we were given, in addition to the cheap and yet filling meals that seem the norm in what I was rapidly coming to call Central America, we also got a not unwelcome surprise. As we sat down with our Swedish meatballs and our pork tenderloin we were treated to live country music and dancing. The Twighlighters were in town entertaining the locals (and us), singing those heart-rending songs of love and hardship peculiar to the country-western genre. Steel guitar and everything, it was way cool. I had initially thought that everyone was in costume for the occasion, and then as I cast my glance further afield I realized that if anyone was in costume it might be us. Uh, how close to Texas are we?

Eventually we ground to a halt at a Motel 6 in Dale (Indiana). We watched a John Wayne flick where the Duke plays an aging rancher who, deprived of hands by gold-fever, resorts to child labor in an effort to drive cattle west to market, killing one kid and himself in the process. Pop quiz: name that movie.

I made a mental note to myself about not walking blindly into a cattle stampede.

Leila returned my call and we talked about stuff for a while. I sure was missing her, it turns out that Leon isn't anywhere near as cute. Sigh.