Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad Caverns is so cool it's hard to believe the National Park System hasn't made a special effort to fuck it up like they have with Yosemite Valley. It's in southern New Mexico. In the middle of nowhere. Somewhere near Texas. Carlsbad Caverns is inside a mesa. That's the best way I can explain it. After driving across the plains for about ten miles from the town of Carlsbad you get to the mesa and drive up about 2 thousand feet on a winding road for about 5 miles. Then you get out at the flat top in the parking lot where you look out over a huge small part of the vast Nothing that is New Mexico and then go through the usual Park System crap of Park system buildings with crap for sale and simplistic signs and books and posters and propaganda about how wonderful the National Park System is. If the bats have gone, which they are in winter, you walk to the big hole in the side of the mesa. Big to you, but small compared to the mesa itself. It's a hole that goes down. The path is well made. Very very unusual for the Park system. It switchbacks back and forth real quick as you saunter into this hole in the side of the scenery. Back and forth you go. Into the hole. It's a big hole so it doesn't really "close up" on you. It just gets higher, the opening. You look up and there's the light from the hole. But it's still kinda light down wherever you are. You look around and it's like you're just in some deep cave somewhere with rock all around. There's mellow electrical lighting that allows you to see and you look up again and that hole you walked in is far away. There's just walls and rocks in your sight field. Then you round a turn and you are at the bottom of a huge big space with some lights over here, and some lights over there, and some lights up here and some lights up there. You don't see the lights just the things they illuminate, which is the entire place, in a sort of dim illumination. Me and Cecily were the only ones in there. We were alone. No guide. No tourists. We were all alone in one of the busiest tourist places on earth. And as we looked around we slowly came to realize we were also alone in one of the weirdest, bizarrest tourist places on earth. Maybe in the solar system. The entrance hole is long gone now. You've been walking inside the ground for a while but the construction of the downward pathway made of slip resistant gravel and rock bits and the handrails occupy your interest during the initial decent since you notice there is not too much else to look at except the path you're walking on since it winds downward steeply enough for you to want to pay attention to it. And then by the time it levels itself a bit and you can stand upright and look around, it's then you notice that you are entombed in a huge vault and that nothing you are looking at is any kind of familiar sight. Rock and wall has now been replaced with sculptures and gothic, dark, creepy, monstrously huge pseudobiomechanical artworks of psyche-torquing weirdness and silent, vast ubiquity. The things are everywhere. Up there: over there; over here; your face begins a slow, open jawed perusal of one direction or another and your eyes travel past a frozen solid rock apparition of petrified infection and move across a dripping morass of hanging weirdness and across a rising tower of piled-upon rock pus and upward to the vast rock ceiling in all directions from which hang spears and drapes and columns weighing tons and pointed right at your skull and hundreds of individual lances 30 feet long pointing at you like some sort of angry virus targeting you for multiple impalements - a silent and ominous menagerie hollering quietly into your head, screaming aloud in dead cool and silence how irrelevant you are to
anything other than to yourself; that merely the slow drip of cold water can over a period of a million years, with no one like you coming by to watch, the slow dripping of water in the cold black dark can build monsters in stone and apparitions in rock, extracting an atom of stone and an atom of rock out of every whacking decending smash of droplet, with 99% of the rock in the water flying away yet still enough of a piece of an atom of stone left to stay in place and then the next drop hits and then after a million of your meaningless lifetimes of looking for a place to squirt sperm, inside this cave a great parade of monsters grows whether or not you are here to keep an eye on it. Making things even more weird is the effect all of this diseased sculpture has on you if you have spent a lot of years playing Extermination and Halo on Play Station and Xbox. A lot of these games have as their main villain, contagion in the form of body eating wall-growths that lap and slop and intrude and take over and suffocate you in vile wet living putrefaction. This of course is an aspect of the experience the dull-witted Park "Rangers" have absolutely no clue about. They don't tell you that if you play Halo or Resident Evil that you are about to have the mother fucking unholy shit scared out of you by what you are going to see. If you ARE one of these people that play Halo or Resident Evil, and if you DO manage to keep your feces inside your body where it certainly belongs and not running down your legs where everybody can see it, one of the ADVANTAGES of seeing a world-class tourist attraction ALL ALONE is that you don't have to hear fat,slovenly, missahpen piles of pork-people nearby saying things like "That looks like pudding!" or "That looks like ice cream!" or "That looks like Popcycles!" or "That looks like a really big cupcake!" or "That loooks like tapioca!" or "That looks like spghetti!" or "That looks like Dairy Queen!" or "That looks like chocolate!" or "That looks like yummy desert!!!!!!" No, when you are embedded deep into the endless roadways of silent gothic sculptural horror that is Carlsbad Caverns alone one good thing is that you don't have to hear your huge fat fellow "Americans" making food references and begging your pardon, can they get by to go back up to the snack bar? Nope. When you're in Carlsbad Caverns alone, and decending down from the bat entrance, and going farther down, and farther down, and farther in under the tons and tons of mesa above you, having nothing to experience but the eternal 56 degree air and the unvarying dim glow of cheap National Park illumination and having nothing to hear but the far off and sometimes nearby drip drip drip of cold lifeless mineral water falling from the far-off dagger-filled and Alien Movie Monstrosity-like ceiling or sliding down the huge lardlike-rippled sides of the grotesque unholy-looking walls in tedious eternal indifferent slap.....slap.....slap.....slaps of tomb-shrouded hollowness, when you are all alone in there, with your wife off somewhere else and maybe dead and sucked into the tendrils of Hell and the tentacles of Slathor Haggoth The Goat God of Black Slime, who the fuck knows, and maybe dissolved into uncoagulated blood mixed with unearthly saliva from the slurping stone mouths of nightmare vileness - if you are like me, and you find yourself in this circumstance..........you are filled with a wonderful, happy, peaceful, uncommunicatable joy. Eventually though I became sad because I knew the walls were NOT alive and that I would not meet my final moments in raging hopeless screaming combat against the Ooze of the Unknown that seemed to be everywhere, in endlessly new and surprisingly hellish forms and designs, with wet monsters growing upwards from the ground and looming mighty and fearsome in roly-poly cascading blankets of stone-turned-evil sloppage and looking at me in the almost-dark and with intellects "vast, cool, and unsympathetic." Nope. Sooner or later I was going to be in the intrusive company of a walrus-assed lesbian Park Ranger who was going to tell me to make sure I kept my hands off the stone and to make sure that I got out of there by closing time and don't forget to use the proper trashcan for the proper trash. Thank you, come back and see us and don't walk there, sir.