We had been touring Civil War battlefields in Tennessee – Ft. Donelson, Shiloh, Stones River – and needed a little peace, so my friend and I stopped in at Mammoth Cave National Park on our way home. Also, it had been a rainy weekend, so we thought some time underground would be a relief.

That’s how much we know about caves. Rain outside Mammoth is rain inside Mammoth, and the porous rock was letting fall a pretty consistent shower as we descended the 800-some steps to our first stop inside. The cascade beat on my brimmed hat and rolled off, but soaked into my friend’s stocking cap and chilled his spine.

We were going through the “new entrance” – actually established back in the early 20th century by an entrepreneur who had figured out that the cave was, in fact, so mammoth that great parts of it must remain unexplored. He found a likely sinkhole, blasted his way in and soon began leading tours to rival the more famous entrance, long known to Native Americans and early pioneers, just a few valleys away.

We had chosen the $12 tour because it features more cave formations – flowstones, stalactites, stalagmites, columns and more – and we were not disappointed. What was amazing was coming out of the two and a half hours underground and looking at a map to see how little of the cave we had actually experienced. At some 400-miles in length, it twists and turns like an intestinal track and, frankly, looks about the same when you photograph it: slick pinkish walls, lumpy and alive.

And speaking of subterranean intestines, did you know that horsehair worms live in the innards of cave crickets? Our two national park guides got in quite an argument about that when one said she’d found one of the worms on the cave wall and the other disputed its origin.
The argument went like this:
“There’s no way those long ol’ worms come out of those little crickets.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uhn-uh.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No way!”
– and ended with today’s ultimate challenge:
“Google it! Google it!”

The argument seemed a world away from the bloody battlefields we had been touring over the past few days. But at the end of the tour we learned that we might not be so far from a little human violence after all. Several of the formations were caged off to prevent further damage to the delicate structures, which we were told were survivors of the Kentucky Cave Wars; that was a time in the early 20th century when – in an effort to steal tourist dollars – rival cave owners would physically sabotage each other’s attractions.

Or so we were led to believe, and I waxed poetic at the time about how man’s twisted desire and capacity for destruction is as vast and unexplored as the caves we had just visited. Then I “Googled it” and found no such reputable claim in any of the online literature. The Kentucky Cave Wars saw hucksters cheating and misleading tourists, but there was no mention of any actual damage to the caves themselves.

My suspicions raised, I also Googled horsehair worms. That, at least, appears to be true, but I’m not going to wax poetic about nature’s twisted capacity for finding a space for life, even inside the intestines of a cricket. I think we all know about that particular kind of violation by now.