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Profound silence; silence so deep that even their breathings were conspicuous in the hush. Tom shouted. The call went echoing down the empty aisles and died out in the distance in a faint sound that resembled a ripple of mocking laughter.

“Oh, don’t do it again, Tom, it is too horrid,” said Becky.

“It is horrid, but I better, Becky; they might hear us, you know,” and he shouted again.

The “might” was even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it so confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened; but there was no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once, and hurried his steps. It was but a little while before a certain indecision in his manner revealed another fearful fact to Becky— he could not find his way back!

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A comment by SusanBAwesome on an open thread, about visiting Carlsbad Caverns, reminded me of one of my best memories of childhood. See, as a kid my local Boy Scout troop would make an annual “caving” trip. I always looked forward to this trip. It was the highlight of the year.

We didn’t go to a place like Luray Caverns. Where we went, there were no handrails, or electric lights and there sure as shit was no gift shop. There was a hole….  in the side of a hill…. somewhere in central Pennsylvania. It was far from anything else. I remember we camped the night before in a field next to a cow pasture.

To access the cave, we parked our cars on the side of the road and climbed up the side of the hill. My high-tech spelunking equipment consisted of:

• 1 Philadelphia Phillies souvenir plastic batting helmet
• 1 K-Mart brand flashlight that my dad wired to a 6-volt lantern battery. (Do they even make those any more? Probably not.)
• Duct tape. For attaching the flashlight to the helmet, natch.
• Extra candles. Just in case.
• Matches. Just in case.
• 1 waterproof match case
• 1 souvenir Philly Phanatic fanny pack, to carry my battery, candles and matches

When I think back, this sounds ridiculously crazy but at the time it made total sense. The souvenir helmet would protect my head, the big battery would last longer than D-cells. I was set!

So we got to the cave, and we went in. Now, when people think of caves, they think of giant caverns and passageways you can easily walk through. That is horseshit! Most real caves are nothing like that. These caves were tighter than a nun’s birth canal. Even us 12-year-old boys had to suck in our stomachs to fit through some of the spaces. Oh, and there was standing water everywhere. I’ll never forget the time we were crawling through a section on all fours and I looked up and there was a baby bat just hangin’ out six inches from my head. He was surprisingly cool with having a bunch of hellions tearing up his cave.

And tear it up we did. I don’t think you can really cause that much ecological damage to a cave just by crawling through it, but we were allowed to run wild. I still remember walking into a room and seeing one of the kids squatting in the corner. Apparently last night’s dinner wouldn’t wait. (When word got back to the dads about the cave-pooping…. there was hell to pay.)

But for the most part, the dads let us just wander off to explore the passageways. At least it seemed like it at the time. Maybe they were keeping an eye on us… but I doubt it.

Now that I think back to those cave trips, I wonder if they’d still let kids do that today. Would parents let their children wander through caves without adults holding their hands? And this was the early 90s. That’s not even a long time ago! Are we really changing that fast?

As an adult I think back to how my great-grandfather had worked around the mines all his life. He was an Italian immigrant who became a blacksmith for a mining company in West Virginia. His trade spared him from a life spent underground, but the world of mining was all around him (actually, he apparently was an organizer for the UMW). Kids not much older than us little Boy Scouts were actually working the mines back in the bad old days.

And now that I’m older, I think I am at least a slightly better person for having gotten a little taste of what it’s like to spend time under the Earth. I’m glad I never had to work in a mine, but I’m also glad that my parents and the other adults around us as kids didn’t take away our ability to explore the world in the name of keeping us always safe.