Spelunking, part 2

Richard and I found another cave—one far more practical—that summer by accident.  In fact, we found it because of one of our interminable fights.

It was a very hot summer afternoon.  Richard and I had been assigned the chore of hoeing weeds in the kitchen garden—the “truck patch.”  We each had a hoe and were chopping away at the endless chore.  I never did figure out why weeds grow so much better than things like tomatoes, onions, watermelons, cantaloupes, and other good stuff—even eggplant—but they sure do.

The sun was beating down and I was wishing that I had been smart enough to put on my clodhopper shoes even if it was summer.  The dry dirt and sand rocks were hot enough to almost burn my feet through the calluses.  Richard had put on his shoes.  Each of us were wearing just overalls with no shirts and we had on our battered straw hats.

With a totally monotonous job like hoeing weeds, you had plenty of time to think about things.  I always went off into a fantasy world daydreaming about things I would like to be.  I was an avid reader of dime pulp magazines about the west, WWI flying aces, and the like so I always had plenty of things to dream up.

Old Richard, on the other hand, seemed to spend a lot of time thinking up ways to get my goat.  It always delighted him to make me mad.  Along with my reddish hair, I had inherited a quick trigger temper and could really fly off the handle at times.

This particular day, just as I was getting on the tail of a red German triplane with the Hisso engine of my Spad roaring and my machine guns chattering, Richard jerked me back to that dusty Ozark garden, “Hey numb nut, you tried getting into ol’ Mary Catherine’s pants lately?”

I could feel my face and ears turning red under the straw hat.  Unfortunately, he knew about one time some years before when I had got caught “playing house” with our cousin.  The fact was that, even though I had thought about it from time to time, I had not had the chance to try anything with her recently.

“You just shut up about Mary Catherine!  Ain’t done nothin’ with her!”

“Maybe not lately,” he went on relentlessly, and obviously enjoying my discomfort, “but I know you have tried more than once.  Got caught, too, didn’t you?!”

He leaped back nimbly when I took a swing at him with my hoe and jeered, “Well, wouldn’t make no difference even if you did get into her pants.  Your little old dinkus is so small that she would even feel it!”

My temper exploded—just as he intended.  “You shut up!”

I took a wild swing at hime with my hoe.  He simply ducked, chuckling gleefully.  My hands were sweaty and I lost my grip on the hoe.  It went flying across the garden and twanged against the hogwire fence.

I scooped up a large clod of the dry hard red earth.  My arm and my aim were good and the clod took Richard right in the pit of the stomach.  He let out an “OOF!”  and fell down.

My anger evaporated as quickly as it had come and I thought I might have really hurt him.  I stepped toward his recumbent and silent form.

“Jeeze,” I said contritely, “I didn’t mean to hurt you!”

Of course I had simply knocked the wind out of Richard.  He made a sudden lunge for my ankles.  “You little sonamabitch,” he gasped, “I’ll get you for that!”

I dance away from him, feeling a sudden flush of fear.  Richard was still a bit bigger than me, and he sometimes got the better of me in combat.  He came up off the ground, his blue eyes slitted with anger.  His hoe was still in his left hand.

I knew the time had come to bail out so I turned tail and ran.  I lost my straw hat as I sailed over the hog-wire fence and shot across the county road toward a patch of brush on Bertha Beck’s farm.  As I dived for cover, I could hear his shoes hit the road and knew he was right behind me.

We were both familiar with that brush patch form trapping rabbits and I knew it would not conceal me for long.  I weaved my way through and out into a wheat field beyond, running for my very life.

Maze Creek was about a half mile away and I headed in that direction, my bare feet scattering grasshoppers as I fled across fields and pastures, vaulting barbed wire fences as I went.  I could hear Richard’s clodhoppers pounding in pursuit.  I was glad of that because, barefoot, I could outrun him and I knew I was gaining on him.

Richard was nearly a hundred yards behind when I reached the trees and brush along the creek, but he was coming on strong.  I cut to my left past our favorite swimming hole that we called the “Big Rock Hole” because there was a large boulder at the edge of a deep pool where we could dive.  Unfortunately, there were sharp flintrocks along the base of the low sheer cliff that bordered the bend in the creek.  I hit one that was sharp as an Indian arrowhead and cut the instep of one foot.

Now I was in trouble.  I knew Richard could catch me easily if I was hobbling on a sore foot.  I could not see even a brush pile that would offer cover for me to go to ground.  Just up the creek a way I saw a mat of wild grapevine growing up the face of the sheer cliff.  I hobbled to it and desperately squeezed my way between the vines and the rock. 

Just as I heard Richard’s footsteps pounding along the creek bank, there was suddenly no rock against my shoulder and I fell sideways into empty space.  Richard went on past heading upstream.

I rolled over and looked around.  I was in a dimly-lit cavern about three feet high and four feet wide, the walls of damp limestone.  It led back into the cliff.

As usual, I had a few kitchen matches in the bib of my overalls.  Cautiously, I inched forward, alert for any possible snake.  After a slight bend, the cave opened out.  I struck a match and found myself in a “room” about ten feet across and high enough that I could stand up.  I saw only two small openings down low before the match went out.

I lit another match and crawled across to one of the openings down against the dirt floor of the cave and, lying on my belly, peered into the hole.  Panic set in—the light of the match was reflected by two beady amber eyes!

Both the case and my sore foot momentarily forgotten, I rolled over then shot headfirst out of the cave, plunging straight through the mat of vines and rolled toward the creek on the rocky ground.  Richard was sauntering back down the creek bank—apparently having given up the chase.  He halted in amazement when I came flying out of apparently a solid rock cliff and exclaimed, “Where in the world did you come from?”

My words came out in a machine gun sputter, “You win.  I hurt my foot and I can’t run anymore and I found a real cave in there only there is an animal in there, too!”

His anger and the chase forgotten, Richard parted the vines and peered into the low dark opening.  “Hey,” he said, “there really is a cave in there!  Got any matches on you?”

I fumbled at my pockets.  “No—used the only ones I had.”

“What did you see in there?”

“Well, there is a room in there not far back but there is a little hole down low and I saw two yellow eyes looking back at me.  There is an animal denned in there!”

“Shoot,” he said scornfully, “probably only a possum or a coon—maybe just a rabbit.  Wouldn’t hurt you.”

“Well, you go see if you want.  I ain’t goin’ back in there without a proper light and the twenty-two.”

Richard squatted there, a calculating look in his blue eyes and chewing reflectively on his lower lip.  “Never heard anyone say anything about a cave along here—bet not many know about it.  We’ll keep it a secret so don’t you tell anyone about it.”

He carefully re-arranged the vines to conceal the opening.  “We can come back later and chase out or kill whatever is in there.  It will make a dandy hideout.”

He got to his feet.  “Come on now, bird brain.  We got to bet back to hoeing them weeds.”

Spelunking, Ozark Style

My father was quite correct.  It was not all that hard on us boys because it was simply our way of life.  We vaguely recalled the better days in Kansas City with some regret, but now things were the way they were and everyone was in the same boat.  Oh, we paged through the Sears Roebuck catalogue in the outhouse often enough looking at bicycles, air rifles, and stuff like that, but they were as far out of reach as the moon so we did our wishing (we always referred to the catalogue as “the wish book”) and went about our business.

Business we had plenty of, as I have mentioned before.  We made our own fun and we had the whole countryside in which to roam and explore looking for new territories and caves.

I recall one early spring Saturday when Richard and I went exploring not long after we moved into that little house south of Bona.  It was early enough in the year that we were still wearing our winter shoes—and wishing it was warm enough to shed them.  This particular day we were looking for the big cave spring that was the origin of Maze Creek.  We had heard that it went back into the hillside.  There was a story that some high school boys from Dadeville had gone back into the cave a half miles or more and did not find the end.  Since there were a lot of passages, the boys had strung binder twine as they went so they could find their way out.  They had to stop when they came to the end of the big ball of twine.

A mile or so east of the Bona-Dadeville road up Maze Creek, we found a large pool of water outside the cave.  There was quite an opening in the limestone cliff where the cold clear water came from underground.  It was perhaps four feet high and eight or ten across.  The water filled it from side to side however.  It was a cold day and we did not fancy going wading in the knew-deep water.

After dinking around a bit, I was ready to start home, but Richard demurred.  “No, dang it,” he said.  “I know there has to be a dry entrance around here somewhere.”

“How you know?”

“Well, that’s what I heard—keep looking around, dummy.”

On the north side of the pool we found a possibility.  There at the base of the bluff was a low arched opening in the grey limestone.  It was only a foot or so high in the middle and perhaps four feet wide.  Richard got a long willow branch and poked it back into the dark opening.

“Hey,” he exclaimed, “this has gotta be it.  Can’t feel anything back in there and it gets higher!  You got any matches on you?”

I fished three kitchen matches from the pencil pocket on the bib of my overalls.  Richard snatched them and said, “Con on—we can squeeze under there as easy as pie.”

Side by side, we wriggled under the rock on our bellies.  Sure enough, three or four feet back there was room to raise our heads.  Richard lit a match.  In the dim yellow light, we could see a cavern perhaps it barely showed in the weak light of the match.

Richard squirmed forward.  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said.  “We got no good light.  Besides, there may be animals in there!”

“Shee-it,” he retorted, ‘don’t be such a skeerdy cat.  If there was it would only be a possum or a skunk—be more scared of you than you of it!”

I prudently remained where I was.  Richard stood up as the match went out , then lit another on the seat of his overalls.  On the far side of the chamber there was a pile of fallen rock.  He moved forward to peer over it.

“Hey—this has gotta be it!  There is a passage back behind there!”

The match went out and Dick lit the third and last one.  “You’re right, though.  We need a good light—lantern and flashlight.  Maybe ought to bring the twenty-two in case of snakes and a ball of binder twine to unroll behind us.”

When the match went out, we scrunched our way back out the low opening and dusted off our clothes.

“Hot dog,” Richard said, “that is one dandy cave!  We’ll come back next Saturday!”

On the way home I thought about the snakes my brother had mentioned.  The Ozarks had plenty of snakes of various kinds—some harmless and some having quite deadly poison.  The poison ones were the water moccasins and cottonmouths along the rivers, the copperheads, and spread-heads (an Ozark version of a cobra) in the hills, and an occasional rattlesnake.

There were a lot of harmless snakes—the blue racer, the blacksnake, and the common carter snake that was so harmless that I used to sometime carry a small one in my pocket with which to scare the girls.  There were other garden snakes that I do not at the moment recall.

Come the following Saturday, after we had finished the morning chores, Richard was hot to trot to go explore that cave.  I, however, raised some practical questions.

“How we gonna get away from here with a lantern, flashlight, the twenty-two, and a ball of binder twine?  Dad isn’t home, but Mother is and she’d know what we were up to for sure.  You think she’s gonna let us go explore an old cave?  Nosirree—she gonna put her foot down for sure!”

He sat on the edge of a barn manger, swinging his legs and chewing on a wheat straw while his blue eyes gazed calculatingly into the distance.  Finally, he spat out the straw.

“Tell you what,” he said as he slid from his perch, “the flashlight is in the bedroom and the twenty-two is leaning by the kitchen door.  Coal oil lantern is in the smokehouse so that’s no problem. 

“We’ll go up to the house.  When we get in the kitchen, I’ll get Mother’s attention and you just set the rifle out on the back porch while her back is turned.  We’ll ask if we can go off in the woods.  She won’t have any reason to turn us down that I know of.

“When she says it’s all right, I’ll go and pick up the rifle on the way—she won’t care about that anyway.  Got some shells in my pocket.  Meanwhile, you say you left your knife in the bedroom.  I’ll cut around the house and you hand the flashlight out the window.  She won’t see me on that side and I can go by the barn and pick up a ball of binder twine.

“After you give me the flashlight, go out to the smokehouse, put the lantern in a gunny sack, then you can go out the back window away from the house.  Cut across the kaffier corn patch and meet me in Dead Dog Hollow.  Come on!”

I could not see any flaw offhand in Richard’s plan right off so I did not object.  I just went along with it, wondering when and if I was going to get the dirty end of the stick again.

My fears were groundless this time.  It worked just fine.  When we got to the kitchen, we announced that the chores were all done.  Richard had even taken an extra armload of cookstove wood in with him.  When we asked if we could go to the woods, Mother just said, “Oh, I don’t see why not.  Just be home in time for the evening chores.”

Richard, meanwhile, was messing around the kitchen counter while I edged over to the little rifle by the door.  He hit the dishpan and a little soapy water splashed out on the floor.

“No look what you’ve done,” Mother scolded.  “I swear you boys are as clumsy as a bull in a china store—get me the mop!”

While that was going on, I quietly eased open the screen door and set the rifle onto the porch.  Richard got the mop then picked up the little rifle as he went out.  I called out, “Wait a minute—I got to get my knife!”

He was under the window when I got to the bedroom.  I handed hi the three-cell flashlight, then went through the kitchen and out to the smokehouse.  I made sure the lantern had kerosene in it, found a gunny sack, lowered it out the rear window, and hopped out.

Keeping low, with the smokehouse between me and the kitchen, I went through the kaffir corn patch and a grove of small persimmon trees to the little hollow beyond.  We called it “Dead Dog Hollow” because one time our Aunt Alice had a little dog that turned to sucking eggs.  No one can abide an egg-sucking dog so my father took the dog out in the woods and shot it.  He buried the dog there in the hollow in a little dirt cave that Dick and I had dug.

Richard was there, a ball of binder twine bulging the bib of his over alls.  We put everything except the rifle into the gunny sack with the lantern then kept to the woods past the woodlot and over the next hill until we were out of sight of the house.

When we arrived at the cave, Richard took the flashlight and the rifle.  I lighted the lantern and slid it ahead of me through the low opening.  Richard had already gone in and was shining the flashlight around the cavern.

It was, indeed, a dandy cave.  There were a couple of shiny small stalactites on one wall and there was a dark low opening beside the rock fall.  We tried it but it did not go anywhere so we tied the end of the binder twine to a rock and started climbing over the rock fall toward a larger opening.

It looked very promising.  Beyond the pile of rocks there was the opening of a tunnel about four feet high and with a nice dry dirt floor.  Short of it, however, we froze because there was a sudden bussing sound in the silence of the cave.  The hairs on the nape of my neck prickled and I said, “Whut wuz that?!”

Old Richard did not linger.  He hissed “Rattlesnake!” and knocked me over as he scrambled back across the rocks toward the entrance.  I dropped the lantern, retrieved it, and was close on his heels.  In the dim light we did not take time to try to spot where the snake might be.  We literally threw the rifle, flashlight, and lantern through the low opening and dived through there like grease through a goose.

After we got our breath, we agree that we would wait until summer to explore that old cave after the snakes were out of their winter hibernation.

We sort of ran the plan in reverse to get the stuff back in place at home.  The glass globe of the lantern got cracked either when I dropped it when the snake rattled or else when I slung it out of the cave ahead of me.  We had a few cents of rabbit money so we replaced it before Dad needed to use the lantern.  I think the globe only cost us twelve cents at Grandpa’s store.

Richard and I never got around to another try at that cave but I did get into it one more time.  A few weeks or months later, and I do not remember the details clearly, there was a bunch of us up there one afternoon.  Leslie Beck was there and some others that included Claude and Billy Todd.

I do not recall why we were there, nor do I recall why I happened to have a torch in the back pocket of my overalls.  The torch was made out of a baking powder can and a hole punched in the top.  I had used a strip of gunny sack for a wick and had filled the can with coal oil.  Probably had been using it to heat a piece of baling wire to make a stem of a corncob pipe.

Anyway, we were there (I can’t remember if Richard was with us) and someone proposed that we go into the cave.  Leslie, who was the oldest, said he would lead the way.  We scrunched through the narrow entrance and then lit my kerosene torch which was the only light we had.  Leslie took the torch and lead the way with three or four of us younger boys following close behind.  It was a very satisfying adventure at first.

We went over the rock pile and along the tunnel beyond.  There were a couple of side tunnels so I used a piece of rock to scratch markers on the mail tunnel since we had not found the roll of binder twine that Richard and I had left in there before.

The tunnel intersected the stream of water somewhere along the line but we could wade across and there was dry dirt on the far side.  Unfortunately, the second time we crossed the underground stream, Leslie tripped and fell into the water—torch and all!  All of a sudden we were plunged into stygian blackness deep in that cave.

No one panicked.  Leslie fished the torch out of the water and we spent several minutes wringing out the wick and trying to get it re-lit.  We had several matches between us.

It was to no avail.  On the second to last match the wick caught for a moment, but it quickly died into nothing but a red ember.  The blackness of the cave was almost suffocating.  I was starting to feel more than a little apprehensive and I’m sure some of the other were also.

Billy Todd said in a low voice, “You reckon we can find our way back?”

Leslie, as the leader, rose to the occasion.  “Sure we can.  We just feel our way back the way we came.”

That did not work.  Twice we came to where there was more than one tunnel branching off and, in the total darkness, we could not find the scratches I had made on the way in.  We were definitely lost.

The second time we came to a passage with water in it someone, maybe crazy Leslie, had an idea.  “The water comes out of the cave—let’s just follow it.”

There was a distinct current so the idea worked fine.  We got wet because in places the roof of the tunnel came down and we had to crawl under with water up to our chins, but after a couple of turns we could see daylight ahead and we came wading out into the sunlight.  I heaved a sigh of relief and had no further desire to explore that particular cave any further.

Rabbit traps, Caves, and Cannon

Another thing my father and his brother had in common with Tom Sawyer were the caves that are part of the Missouri landscape.  Like Tom, they explored those what were near where they lived.

The time we were living on Doc Hunt’s place was at the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  No one in the Ozarks knew much about national economics and such—at least not in our neck of the woods—but we sure knew that times were getting hard and money was mighty scarce.  That is what we called those days—“Hard Times.”

There was practically no way for youngsters to make spending money during Hard Times except for trapping rabbits.  The countryside was full of cottontail rabbits and dealers from the city would buy rabbits in the fall when the weather was cold enough for the carcasses to keep after they were killed.  We could trap rabbits, kill them by breaking their necks, gut them, and sell them at the store for ten or twelves cents apiece.  The city dealers would come by once a week or so and buy the rabbits—the carcass for meat markets and the skin for making cheap fur coat collars.

We used box traps to catch the cottontails.  They were wooden boxes about twenty inches long made from pieces of board six and eight inches wide.  There was a vertically sliding door at the front.  Two holes were drilled on the top; one for a forked stick for a fulcrum and the other at the rear for the trigger.  The trigger was connected to the sliding door by strings and a log stick levered over the fulcrum so that when the trap was set the trigger held up the sliding door.  The trap was baited with an apple core or carrot.  When the rabbit went in after the bait and bumped the trigger the door came down and he was caught.

Author's sketch of the kind of rabbit trap he and his brother made.

Richard and I usually had six or eight box traps.  In thickets and fence rows we would find the little paths where the rabbits travelled and set the traps where they would not miss them.  In rabbit season in the fall, we ran our trap line every morning and each evening—killing those we had caught and re-baiting the traps.  We never worked very hard at it, but we would often have three or four rabbits a week to take to the store.  When we got old enough to carry a 22 squirrel rifle, the rabbit money enabled us to buy shells for the slender little Remington rolling-block single-shot rifle that Dad got for us when I was ten.

Richard and I were to grow up carrying that little squirrel rifle while we roamed the fields and woods.  Dad taught us to handle it safely and how to aim with deadly accuracy.  He taught us never to aim a gun unless we intended to shoot and to shoot straight.  His philosophy was, “if you can see it, you can hit it.”  When we killed a squirrel, for instance, we did not just shoot at the squirrel.  We shot at his eye.  We killed squirrels only for meat for the table and shooting one through the body tended to spoil the meat.  If we could not see the head, we did not shoot.

Once in a while, of course, we would accidentally gut-shoot a squirrel.  When that happened to me (which was not often, I am happy to say) I would bury a badly gut-shot squirrel rather than be embarrassed by taking one home that I had not shot in the head.  I know that Richard occasionally did that also, although he seldom missed.  He was always a shade better than I was.  In fact, I saw him competing successfully in adult turkey shoots when he was only fourteen and I have known him to knock down a quail on the wing with that 22 rifle.  Of course I insisted the latter had to be an accident to be an accident!

That, however, was later on as in 1930 we were still not allowed to carry a rifle.  Instead, we had to be content with trapping rabbits, fishing, and just roaming the countryside exploring.  We found our first cave along the creek north of the Doc Hunt place.  We had been fishing with a neighbor boy who was two or three years older and were moseying along the creek bank under the trees along the base of a limestone cliff when we spied a dark opening about three feet high.  We hiked back across the fields to the neighbor’s house, borrowed a coal oil lantern, then went back to explore the cave.

It was a dandy cave.  The narrow passageways back into the cliff a few feet then widened into a low room maybe eight feet across from which two passageways led off into the limestone.  We could go no farther, however, as the openings were too low to crawl into.  The only thing unusual we found was a small glossy blue and green stalactite to carry home in my pocket.

Our father gave us another lesson about that.  When I proudly showed him the piece of stalactite, he turned it in his hands then explained to us how those stalactites take hundreds of years to form from water dripping through the limestone.  I felt bad then about damaging it and even thought about taking the piece back and gluing it into place but I never got around to it.  The result was that I never again thoughtlessly destroyed any sort of natural wonder.

That was the summer we made a steam cannon and could have gotten badly injured in the process.  We were fooling around with the same older neighbor boy (whose name I cannot recall) and came across an abandoned old broken-down blacksmith shop.  There were some dandy pieces of junk piled out behind the weathered old building and one of them was a piece of iron pipe about ten or twelve feet long.  It was capped at one end.

The neighbor boy proposed that we make a steam cannon and he proceeded to show us how.  The pipe was about three inches in diameter.  We spent about an hour cutting a plug from the end of a tree branch that would fit tightly into the open end of the pipe.  That done we built a fire and got it going good while we carried some water from the creek in an old bucket and filled the pipe about half full with it.  We then drove the wood plug tightly into the pipe, stacked up some rocks and propped the pipe up at an angle with the lower half across the fire.  The idea was to boil the water until steam pressure built up enough to blow out the plug.  Hopefully it would blow out before the pipe exploded.

It is possible the boys had seen an ad like this.

It took quite a while for the steam pressure to build up.  I got tired of just sitting waiting and was wandering around when finally, there was a satisfying BOOM!  The pipe jumped and fell off the rocks, and we could hear the wooden plug screaming off into the distance.  In later years during my engineering courses at the University of Washington I realized that we were lucky that we had not driven that plug into the pipe too tightly because the old rusty pipe could have exploded from the steam pressure and sent shrapnel flying in all directions.  At any rate, it was a very satisfactory experiment, but we never got around to trying it again.

The lessons of the Doc Hunt place would come together in the future when team work, creativity, shooting skill, and a large measure of grace would protect the Frieze boys.