dream.
As in a traditional grotto, part of Fairyland Caverns is natural, and part is man-made. There are mechanical elements: piped music, rotating water wheels, animatronic sailors gone to sea in a yawing washtub. And, as traditionally, water is a key feature from the first fountain to the final room, where a stream tumbles over quartz in a four-stepped water stair, catena d’acqua. Minerals line the walls, the ceiling bristles with coral, and the pool glitters with wishing pennies.
Leaving Diamond Corridor, make your slow way through the caverns, pausing here and there for a look at dioramas through those round portals cut in plywood. The artist, Jessie Sanders, had been expert at creating the look of real surprise. Had sculpted dozens of figures for Fairyland: miners, Santa’s helpers, bootleggers, skaters floating on a flannel-rimmed pond. Bears chase Goldilocks, but their hearts aren’t in it. Dwarfs cluster with squirrels and rabbits, Snow White poses in a pretty glen, and the faint strains of “Rock-A-Bye Baby” filter in from somewhere. Hansel and Gretel approach a sad-looking Witch too tired to be sinister, just an old woman getting home after a long shift. Her cottage’s peppermint-stick pillars tilt out-of-true. Not much, but it’s paid for, she seems to say, trudging heavily toward the kids, their hands already out.
I’d remembered Diamond Corridor but forgotten the dioramas inside, how they fiddle with dimension, tautly foreshortening or stretching out into delirious long shots; how the gnomes’ jaws and cheekbones jut sharply, shiny with lacquer. How their beards gleam in the ultraviolet light, and how their tights shimmer. Fairyland Caverns opened in 1947, and the ultraviolet light there carries a hint of radioactive threat. Everyday things—teeth, white T-shirts—glow under it.
In July 1945, as I’ve mentioned, scientists exploded the first atomic bomb in remote New Mexico. I imagine Jessie Sanders working on her sculptures during the Trinity test, dipping her brush in pots of fluorescent paint as scientists half a continent away calculated what the fallout might be, the half-life of plutonium, where the winds might carry the particles. Some of those particles rained down on a rancher—nobody knew he lived where he did. Of the fallout he said, It smelled funny.
Here’s a scene from “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving’s version of an ancient story. Unhappy at home, Rip escapes to the woods with his rifle and his dog. High in the mountains he meets a group of strange, silent men, bowling and boozing. They stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze, that his heart turned within him and his knees smote together. When they look away he sneaks draughts of their powerful wine, waking in the morning to find his rifle rusty and his dog vanished, twenty years lost. He returns to his town, a place gone strange. When he insists, I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, folks just laugh.
Rip leans on his rifle for support. Two men stand nearby, jubilant, leering. One clenches a pipe in his teeth, and the other carries a basket of glowing coals. But the look on Rip’s face strikes me; despite his long sleep, he’s exhausted, eyes dark with worry, and if he could speak he’d say, What have I done?
Well, he’s survived his own mortality, nothing less. And so he’s rewarded with the rare chance to see his place—family, home, community—after his death, for so his twenty years’ disappearance had seemed to be. How would he be remembered? For his kindnesses to strangers, for his gentle playfulness with children? Psalm 31:12, Forgotten as a dead man, out of mind. To fall asleep under the mountain is to be erased as though you had not been. If not for the tired welcome of his long-lost daughter, Rip would not be remembered at all.
What draughts do we drink to make us forget so much? The world shifts around us; like an old man said to me once, Used to joke you could lie down in the middle of Highway 123 on a Saturday night and go to sleep. Look at it now. You can’t see where you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. Rip awoke old, safely doddering, ignored. They’d cut down the oak tree and planted a flagpole in its place. He’d slept through the revolution.
DIAL: 4
OBJECTIVE: CHICKAMAUGA BATTLEFIELD
—View scenic points through these Bausch & Lomb
binoculars. 25 Cents.
We aren’t the first to visit this mountain, not by a long shot. Consider the Battle of Lookout Mountain, also known as the Battle Above (or Within) the Clouds. See Mission Ridge and Lookout Mountain, with Pictures of Life in Camp and Field, B. F. Taylor, 1872. “And here we are pleasantly walking where sleeps an earthquake; making each other hear where slumbers a voice that could shake these everlasting hills,” wrote Taylor, musing in the munitions tent of the Army of the Cumberland, 1863. After the battle, he wrote, “Mission Ridge has been swept with fire and steel as with a broom.”
Taylor’s camp imagery, vital and immediate, lets the reader in on a world that war movies skip. He notes the tents’ “genuine home-like air. The bit of a looking-glass hangs against the cotton wall; a handkerchief of a carpet before the bunk marks the stepping-off place to the land of dreams; a violin case is strung to a convenient hook. . . . The business of living has fairly begun again.” Can’t you see the place, clear as a stage set? So with a few strokes here and there, we make a resting place, as if to stay awhile. But things change quickly when the order comes to strike camp. Overnight, “the canvas city has vanished like a vision. On such a morning and amid such a scene I have loitered till it seemed as if a busy city had been passing out of sight, leaving nothing behind for all that light and life but empty desolation.” Broken branches in a smoldering heap; trampled fields of stubble. Give it a few years and you’ll never know anything out of the ordinary had happened here, though decades from now some keen-eyed person might turn up a bullet casing or a coin crusted with verdigris.
Of the soldiers, Taylor wrote, “If there is a curious cave, a queer tree, a strange rock, anywhere about, they know it. . . . Home they come with specimens that would enrich a cabinet. The most exquisite fossil buds just ready to open, beautiful shells, rare minerals, are collected by these rough and dashing naturalists. If you think the rank and file have no taste and no love for the beautiful, it is time you remembered of what material they are made.” So they might have loved the grotto of Fairyland; they might have created their own cabinets of wonder, protomuseums, in the lidded boxes of peacetime life.
If there is nothing new under the sun, neither is there anything new beneath the earth. Grottoes functioned as early theaters; caves have interesting backdrops and good acoustics, and their shape lingers still in the arch over the stage in modern theaters. So, too, Fairyland Caverns is stuffed with scenes from childhood stories, frozen and stiff. And that light! Ultraviolet light is a way for humans to see the world as some other creatures do; it translates their vision into our own language of sight. Honeybees see patterns on flowers that direct them to pollen and nectar. Because these patterns show up at shorter wavelengths, they are visible to bees, but not to humans. In a rock shop I visited once, a curtained corner hid a display case containing mineral samples. When you pressed a button, an ultraviolet light switched on, and certain samples glowed green and purple. Once the timer ran out, you saw the same specimens, dull and unremarkable. Ultraviolet light let you in on their secret.
The light in Fairyland Caverns points toward something larger than itself; like an anxious friend, it pokes you in the side, whispering, This isn’t right. Things have changed, and it feels wrong to repeat the same old stories. Although it’s a comfort to know what comes next—Yankee Doodle went to town / Riding on a pony—there’s a disconnect, a break: Trinity. If you want to see something of Trinity, go to New Mexico, where the nuclear age began. Face the explosion, the original light that Fairyland slantwise reflects. Yes, you could trace it further: say the bomb started with the Curies’ radium research, or with Jewish physicists on the run from Hitler; say it started under the old squash court at the University of Chicago; say the seeds of apocalypse were sown at the Earth’s very beginning. But for argument’s sake,
