reef drop by drop, countless billions of teeth of time that left behind magnificent underground chambers as megatherial and as stupefying as time itself.
Nobody believed the cowboy’s tall tale about stumbling through the belly of God, of course. The only man who listened was Abijah Long, a guano miner who cared little for the caves themselves. Hiring Jim White as his foreman, Long leased the land, and the two set about turning twenty thousand years of bat guano into fertilizer for Californian farms. White never lost sight of what he considered the real resource—the caves themselves. Whenever he had a free moment, he continued exploring them and gave tours to whoever asked. For twenty years, he wrote letters trying to get scientists, newspapermen, and the government interested.
When the Department of the Interior finally got around to sending a dubious inspector to New Mexico to check out White’s claims, he returned to Washington a humbled man: “I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Devine [sic] Creator’s work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders…” he wrote in his official report.
Calvin Coolidge finally declared Carlsbad Caverns a national park in 1930. It had taken Jim White nearly thirty years of letter writing, but at long last, thanks to the most dogged booster of them all, Carlsbad was fixed on the map. Salvation had come from beneath the very desert they had fought to tame. A dying town built on flimflam, false promises, and failed ventures had finally found a great emptiness that it could sell forever.
It was close to five P.M. when Raffi and David finally pulled up to White’s City, a cluster of tourist shops and motels that clings tothe park entrance. They were road weary, nursing the dregs of a hangover from their night out in Austin, eager to find a place to camp and rest. At the Texaco station just off Highway 62/180, they asked Brian Laxson, an attendant, if he knew of any nearby campgrounds.
“There’s an R.V. park, and you can also camp up at the caverns,” Laxson told them. They decided that the second option, camping in the park itself, was the best choice. They’d be closer to the caves, and it would be cheaper. They hopped back into the Mazda and wound their way up the seven-mile road to the visitor center.
Carlsbad Caverns’ visitor center sits atop a broad plateau—a remnant of the ancient Permian reef that overlooks the surrounding desert for miles. Getting out of the car and stretching, they saw a flat and limitless peel of rusty land, an immense griddle with a horizon that stretched all the way back into Texas. The air conditioner in the Protegé had been set on high; now they abruptly felt the Chihuahuan heat, mixed with the tarred air of the hot summer parking lot.
It was a cool seventy inside the visitor center. The day’s last tourists were exiting the cave elevators, a pair of ingeniously convenient lifts that descend 754 feet straight into the Big Room, a cavern so colossal that it takes an hour to walk its perimeter. The walls of the visitor center were covered with geological exhibits and photographs of the wonders below: towering stalagmite columns, gypsum crystals suspended by threadlike stalks, flowing draperies of sandstone so intricately textured that they resembled forests, broccoli, ice-cream cones. It would have to wait for the morning.
At the information desk, a young ranger with a dark, seaman’s beard was fielding questions from a line of tourists, most of theminterested in that evening’s bat flight—an event that Raffi and David would have wanted to see. In just about an hour, over a million Mexican free-tailed bats would begin their nightly exodus from the caverns’ natural entrance—the same wondrous spectacle that had lured Jim White to the caves a hundred years
Nobody believed the cowboy’s tall tale about stumbling through the belly of God, of course. The only man who listened was Abijah Long, a guano miner who cared little for the caves themselves. Hiring Jim White as his foreman, Long leased the land, and the two set about turning twenty thousand years of bat guano into fertilizer for Californian farms. White never lost sight of what he considered the real resource—the caves themselves. Whenever he had a free moment, he continued exploring them and gave tours to whoever asked. For twenty years, he wrote letters trying to get scientists, newspapermen, and the government interested.
When the Department of the Interior finally got around to sending a dubious inspector to New Mexico to check out White’s claims, he returned to Washington a humbled man: “I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Devine [sic] Creator’s work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders…” he wrote in his official report.
Calvin Coolidge finally declared Carlsbad Caverns a national park in 1930. It had taken Jim White nearly thirty years of letter writing, but at long last, thanks to the most dogged booster of them all, Carlsbad was fixed on the map. Salvation had come from beneath the very desert they had fought to tame. A dying town built on flimflam, false promises, and failed ventures had finally found a great emptiness that it could sell forever.
It was close to five P.M. when Raffi and David finally pulled up to White’s City, a cluster of tourist shops and motels that clings tothe park entrance. They were road weary, nursing the dregs of a hangover from their night out in Austin, eager to find a place to camp and rest. At the Texaco station just off Highway 62/180, they asked Brian Laxson, an attendant, if he knew of any nearby campgrounds.
“There’s an R.V. park, and you can also camp up at the caverns,” Laxson told them. They decided that the second option, camping in the park itself, was the best choice. They’d be closer to the caves, and it would be cheaper. They hopped back into the Mazda and wound their way up the seven-mile road to the visitor center.
Carlsbad Caverns’ visitor center sits atop a broad plateau—a remnant of the ancient Permian reef that overlooks the surrounding desert for miles. Getting out of the car and stretching, they saw a flat and limitless peel of rusty land, an immense griddle with a horizon that stretched all the way back into Texas. The air conditioner in the Protegé had been set on high; now they abruptly felt the Chihuahuan heat, mixed with the tarred air of the hot summer parking lot.
It was a cool seventy inside the visitor center. The day’s last tourists were exiting the cave elevators, a pair of ingeniously convenient lifts that descend 754 feet straight into the Big Room, a cavern so colossal that it takes an hour to walk its perimeter. The walls of the visitor center were covered with geological exhibits and photographs of the wonders below: towering stalagmite columns, gypsum crystals suspended by threadlike stalks, flowing draperies of sandstone so intricately textured that they resembled forests, broccoli, ice-cream cones. It would have to wait for the morning.
At the information desk, a young ranger with a dark, seaman’s beard was fielding questions from a line of tourists, most of theminterested in that evening’s bat flight—an event that Raffi and David would have wanted to see. In just about an hour, over a million Mexican free-tailed bats would begin their nightly exodus from the caverns’ natural entrance—the same wondrous spectacle that had lured Jim White to the caves a hundred years
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