Escape from Heavy Caverns (continued)

Trippin’ Roads, Rails, and Mountain Trails
Episode 1b, August 1969 

By the time the doors opened at Dinosaur Caverns, a small crowd had gathered. I told Charlie, “Keep an eye on the truck, girl. I’ll be back in a while.” She found a shady bush, pawed at the ground a few times, and plopped down.

Once inside, we bought five-dollar tickets and were directed to a waiting area.

My head was beginning to buzz. The acid was taking effect.

                                                     Whoosh . . . Buzzzz . . . Zing . . . Whirrrr

The familiar chorus of acid sounds filled my head. Maybe it was the blood flowing through my capillaries . . . or the millions of nerve synapses exploding. I was always amazed by how noisy it was.

Albert smiled and whispered, “I’m already ripped. This is going to be so cool, man.”

“Ditto.”

It seemed like forever before a roly-poly fellow with bad blond hair and a jolly British accent herded us toward an elevator. He wore a big yellow-and-black polka-dot bow tie over a pale-red shirt. I don’t know if it was the shirt or the acid, but his nose was red too.

He squeezed sixteen of us along with himself into that elevator. Somebody was chewing Black Jack gum, emitting powerful anise fumes. If I could check for black tongues, I knew I’d find the culprit.

The man with the flaming nose began an overenthusiastic spiel, “My name is Cheers, and I’ll be your guide today. Listen carefully because I’m going to show you some profoundly amazing things.” 

All right!

The shaky elevator groaned, bounced, and jerked to a stop. The door gradually opened, and we untangled and stepped onto a landing in a huge, cubical underground room. The space must have been fifty yards in width and length and at least that in height with a walkway around the perimeter. From where we stood, I couldn’t really see any formations, but the gigantic, twelve-foot-tall stack of cardboard boxes in the center of the room was hard to miss.

Cheers said, “The federal government has stored fallout-shelter supplies here since the Cuban Missile Crisis, enough to feed 2,000 people for a month.”

You gotta be kidding. Fallout-shelter supplies? My overactive mind envisioned a nuclear hell up above. Why would the Russians drop a bomb there? Did they have a vendetta against lizards and sagebrush?

                                                          Whoosh . . . Buzzzz . . . Zing . . . Whirrrr

Next, our guide lined us up for a memento photo of our visit, available for purchase in the gift shop after the tour. I had to keep a straight face at the thought of that photo with all those straight-laced, corn-fed families and gray-haired retired couples wearing plaid Bermuda shorts and polka-dot sun dresses—and two shaggy hippies with shit-eating grins on the far left, fitting in like cockleburs in a bride’s bouquet. It would be like one of those puzzles: What doesn’t belong in this picture?

Then the young guy taking the photo waved his hand at Albert and me, gesturing for us to move closer to the herd. So I squeezed next to a heavy-set, bald redneck type, and judging from his sour expression, he wasn't exactly thrilled.

“Everybody smile now.”

And then came the FLASH!

One of those big blue flashbulbs nearly blew my eyeballs out of their sockets, then went on to bounce around my acid-riddled brain for far too long. Yikes! And this was followed by that disorienting, glaring-blue partial blindness, multiplied quantitatively by my drug-induced state.

Can I see my feet? I think I see my feet. Are those my feet?

We stumbled after Cheers as he motioned us to follow.

It seemed everything in the place had some sort of a catch. We were shown the two stalactites, a small one next to a large one. Well, not really a large one. It was missing. Only the base was still there. The rest had disappeared.

Then we saw a really cool crystalline rosette formation in a little alcove off the main room, and even though it was beautiful, I had seen bigger and better displays in the Natural History Museum. Cheers told us about some human bones found when the cavern was first explored—but the bones had been removed! “We do have bones over here from a coyote that must have fallen down the original shaft.”

We finally worked our way over to the other side of the big room. Cheers pointed with pride. “Remember when I told you I would show you that spot on the opposite wall? We call it Snoopy. If you look carefully, you will see a likeness of Snoopy, the dog in the Peanuts cartoon.”

Given our state, you'd think if we were told that Santa was screwing the Easter Bunny on top of that stack of fallout-shelter supplies, we would have hallucinated it just fine!

“What? Where? Huh. I don’t see any Snoopy,” I said to Albert. ‘Do you see anything?”

“Uh . . . no. What’s he talking about?”

“Shit, man. We should get some of whatever he’s on.”

                                                           Whoosh . . . Buzzzz . . . Zing . . . Whirrrr

Finally, we made it back to the elevator shaft, and I was ready to get the hell out of this pit. Some fresh air and sunshine would be a welcome relief. But Cheers wasn't done with us yet.

There’s such a thing known as a guided experience where someone talks you through pleasant images to enhance your trip, taking advantage of your accelerated imagination, like, “Now you are in a serene forest and you come to a meadow filled with wildflowers and a pristine babbling brook.”

Cheers had his special version of that. As we lined up at the elevator doors, he began speaking.

“Okay, everyone, turn around. There is one more thing before you go. I’m going to turn off the lights so you can see what it was like before man discovered these caverns.”

Cheers threw a big switch on the wall. “You see. It’s pitch black in here, except for the little bit of light leaking through the elevator door, of course. What do you think would happen if you were to fall through the original entrance of this cavern in the old days? You’d probably die. But if you lived through the fall, you would certainly suffer many broken bones. Eventually, because of the total darkness, your eyes would rot and cease to work, and then because there hasn’t been any water in here in a hundred million years, except, of course, when we wash down the walkways and mats, your skin would scale and crack and bleed. But the desolation and loneliness would probably drive you stark raving mad before all of that could happen—that is, of course, if you didn’t die of starvation and dehydration first.”

Enough already! Beam me up, Scotty. Shit!

CLICK! At last, he turned the lights back on and pushed a button that opened the elevator door. Albert and I were the first ones aboard, and we kept our freak-out inside for what seemed to be an eternity, as that overstuffed sardine can on pulleys slowly groaned us toward freedom. Every cell in my body was screaming, and I wondered if the others could hear my booming heart. 

                                                          Whoosh . . . Buzzzz . . . Zing . . . Whirrrr

When the doors opened to the surface of the world and the tourists finally filed out of our way, we headed straight for the door.

“Man, that was heavy,” Albert said as we neared the exit.

“Shit, man. They should call this damn place Heavy Caverns.”

“Heavy Caverns. You got that right. Ready to get out of here?”

“You bet your sweet ass. Let’s split.”

                                                                 (to be continued . . . )

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Watch for the next installment of my true-life adventures from the ’60s. To receive chapters delivered directly to your email box, sign up here. All released episodes of Trippin’ are available here.

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