It isn’t every day you get to walk down the corridor of your unconscious, but that was my husband’s take on our trip through Shoshone, Idaho’s Mammoth Cave, a long, underground, tube-like cavern created millions of years ago by a volcanic eruption.
It has been a bear cave, home to primitive man, a government fallout shelter and, most recently, a mushroom incubator, but it’s now simply a tourist attraction for people traveling lonely State Highway 75.
Idaho’s Mammoth Cave (not to be confused with Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave) is a bumpy, gravelly mile-and-a-half off the main road. At the turn-off and at the entrance to the compound, you are greeted by a line-up of oversized carved stone faces, some grimacing, some smiling, some pensive, all so fabulously disturbing we would try (unsuccessfully) to purchase one before we left.
The cave itself is presided over by what my husband would later call “an apathetic Guardian of the Gate” – a young man deeply engrossed in the “Dr. Phil” show in the anteroom of the eerie Shoshone Bird Museum of Natural History. The museum houses the preserved remains of almost every creature that has walked the planet, including dinosaurs, wildcats, boars, a variety of fanged ancient canines, a giraffe, a hundred or more bird species and a few alarmingly alive-looking scorpions and furry tarantulas on little pedestals under domed glass lids. And that’s just a partial list.
The Guardian tore himself away from the travails of a young woman and her rocky relationship with the mother who may or may not have stolen her boyfriend just long enough to light and hand us two voluptuously flaming propane lanterns and point us in the direction of the cave. We wound our way past an outhouse and down a few hundred feet of slippery gravel. The western sunlight was blinding. Noisy insects went “tick-tick-tick” in the dry brittle grasses. The fire from my lantern singed my wrist.