same bat time, same bat channel

Thursday morning, I woke up in El Paso - which Jessica fondly calls "one of the armpits of Texas" - and updated the blog. Yea for hotels with free internet. I left at noon and drove the three hours to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I thought for a minute about skipping it and going straight to Austin, because I was getting tired and it was out of the way, but then decided I should just go. It took me about three hours, not counting stopping at a border patrol station and explaining who I was and where I was going and how I really am seriously not Mexican.

I thought I had been to Carlsbad Caverns before. I have memories of my dad explaining the difference between stalactites (with a C for Ceiling) and stalagmites (with a G for Ground.) But I haven't been there; it must have been another cave. It was in the middle of the desert, with nothing for miles. I stopped a few miles away at a little shop that said it sold tickets for the caves, but I think that was just a ploy to get you to come in and buy fudge. The woman gave me four samples and was trying to give me more but I begged off. I knew it was a bad idea to have fudge samples as your first meal of the day and then walk for miles in a cave. But I ate them anyway. They were delicious.

Carlsbad Caverns were first explored in the early 1900s by a 16-year-old cowboy named Jim White who was out mending fences, saw a cloud of smoke in the distance, and followed it to find that it was not smoke, but a cloud of bats leaving the entrance of the cave. He started exploring the cave with a lanterns, and over the next few decades became the expert on the cave, naming the various features and leading National Geographic surveyors through the caverns.

I paid my six dollars to hike down through natural entrance to the cave (as opposed to taking the elevator nine miles down to the bottom.) I just made the afternoon cutoff for the latest you could enter, which ended up being really nice because for almost the entire way down I was alone on the trail. And it was... well, creepy, to be honest, but quiet and lovely too.

This is at the beginning of the hike, looking back up at the entrance. During the day, hundreds of swallows swoop around the cave, but they're too small to show up in this picture:


It took about an hour to get to the bottom of the hike, which ends in the "Big Room." The caverns are incredible and spectacular. I walked along in the dark and damp, water dripping off the limestone all around me, and occasionally on me, and thought how beautiful this world is.

Apparently a lighting designer from Broadway created the setup so that some features are highlighted while keeping the overall sense of darkness. Early visitors to the cave, led on tours by Jim White, had to be lowered in a guano mining bucket and explored the cave with lanterns. I thought about how thrilling that would be... and also how dark. It would be fun to have such a sense of discovery but I'm sure they also missed a majority of what is amazing about the cave, part of which is the sheer scope.

My pictures honestly don't do it justice, but here are a few:


After the hike, I had an hour or two to kill before the evening flight of the bats, so finally got something to eat to counterbalance the four pieces of fudge, and took a nap in my car, during which I think I wrenched my neck. It's still bothering me. Although maybe I'm blaming the nap when I should be blaming the hundreds and hundreds of highway miles. Both literally and figuratively.

A little after 7 I walked down to the stone seats built into the hillside in front of the natural entrance of the cave to see the bat flights. Most nights during the summer, thousands of Mexican freetail bats leave the cave at sunset to feed, returning at dawn. These bats are tiny, only three inches from head to foot, as you can see from the picture at right, which I have to admit, I didn't take. Those aren't even my fingers. I tried to catch a bat to keep as a pet, but I failed.

The sun was beginning to set, and a few swallows still flew and chirped around the cave. A little before 8, a few bats began to fly out of the cave, and in about ten seconds the whole entrance was full of tiny black swooping bats. It reminded of me of the scene in The Green Mile, when John Coffee opens his mouth and the black evil flies out.

The park rangers don't allow cameras in the areas during the bat flights out of fear that the noise will disturb the bats' sonar. I really wished I could have taken pictures. I have never seen anything like it. Hundreds of bats would fly out, in a constant flow, swoop around in a big cloud, off to the right, and fly off into the desert, a long black snaky line against a lavender sky. It was amazing. And then, in about fifteen minutes, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The thick cloud slowed down to a trickle of bats, and then they were gone, little black specks in the distance.

Happy Birthday, Jason!