The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
There was the lavender muscovite from Canada, and the yellow knob of sulfur, still smelling as sour as it ever had. Best of all, there was a polished slab of agate, small as a baby’s fist, whose every wrinkle and stripe I remembered immediately. The band of rich red with a stutter of white floating above! It looked like the horizon of a desert landscape I hoped even then to someday see.
I loved the world, believed its every inch paved with treasure, but knew it could be ripped away at any moment. Death was real; the preaching we heard every Sunday underscored that. A farm accident instantly killed my grandfather. A girl my own age, eight or nine, lost her mother one Friday night when her mother’s car was forced off a bridge. You’re no different, the preachers said, and I had to admit their logic. They’d start in on the scary parts of the Bible: Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, the moon turning red on that great and fearsome day. The Battle of Armageddon could start at any moment, the preachers would say, even now, while we’re sitting here in this big beautiful sanctuary, and are you right with God? Well, who could be? There will be a blast of wind, the rivers will turn to blood, the preachers said. Matthew 24:29, The stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. What a relief when we could all file out of the barn-like church, shaking the preacher’s hand on the way into the bright sun, past the blooming crepe myrtles and the old crabapple tree. How could we go out for fried chicken after that? How could I lie on the living-room floor and read the funnies or look at the paper’s pictures of boring debutantes? I asked my parents about the end of the world, and they said, Try not to worry about it too much. Sometimes, after that, when my mind wandered during the sermons, I let it go—down the path my own feet had made through the pines; later, to dresses, always red, that would fit only me. I gazed at the fake stones set in the little rings I loved to wear, saw the lights of the sanctuary reflected in them, and let my eyes go out of focus, staring at my earthbound vision.
TO ESCAPE TEMPORARY BLINDNESS
BURY YOUR FACE IN YOUR ARMS
—Survival Under Atomic Attack,
Office of Civil Defence; 1950
Fairyland Caverns is a grotto, of course, and a grotto is a place with a long history. The ancient Greeks worshipped caves, the water flowing through them, and the nymphs associated with that water. The first grottoes were naturally occurring caves, but in time people dug caves out of rock, expanded existing caves, and heightened the effect of water sources by installing pipes that spurted liquid on the unwary. The practice of building grottoes was revived in Italy during the Renaissance, when wonderful things such as water organs—pipe organs played by falling water—were invented. Artists embellished cave walls with bas-relief; they arranged shells, mineral specimens, and chips of glass in swirling mosaics. If there were no natural stalagmites, they made their own, dripping cement into elaborate towers. If there were no nearby beachcombing sites, they imported shells from the West Indies. Those with enough money created spaces where the natural world was represented in abundance. They entered, perhaps, through the carven mouth of an ogre, his forehead inscribed OGNI PENSIERO VOLA: “Every thought flies.” These were places to dawdle, shilly-shally; places to 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