Subterranean swimming

If you have never visited Blanchard Springs Caverns, gentle readers, I encourage you to do so. Although the caverns themselves have been there deep within the Ozarks, for millennia, it has only been fairly recently that they have been available for viewing by the general public.
The existence of the caverns has been known for quite some time, but until the 1970s, it was pretty inconvenient for anybody to get a look at them. They are “living caves” in that they are still being modified by the forces of nature. This makes the National Forest Service folks, who are in charge of them, very particular about what visitors can touch while visiting the caverns.
To say the formations within the caverns are beautiful is to entirely understate the truth. They are breath-taking.
It was during the late 1960s and early 70s while I was in college, that I first became aware of this natural wonder. The National Forest Service was in the process of opening the caverns up for viewing, but this was a long and laborious procedure. Just to get into the caves, you had to go down a rope through a small opening in the top of a mountain. Obviously, this was going to be a real drawback as a tourist attraction. So the side of the mountain had to be opened up without harming the caves themselves.
Before even beginning this process, however, there were other matters to be considered. No one was sure whether or not there had ever been any other access to the caverns, other than the fissure in the mountain top or the point where the springs emerged from underground. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the caves might have been a place of human habitation at some time. If so, there might have been important scientific information to be obtained from any remaining artifacts.
So, the powers that be sought the help of the Anthropology Department at Memphis State University. They needed somebody foolhardy enough to go down into the caverns and do a thorough inspection to determine if people had ever lived in them. I say “foolhardy” because not only would they have to shimmy down a rope to get into the caverns, they would have to be able to climb back up the rope to get out. Also, they would have to be able to use and carry in and out with them self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or scuba gear, since it was already known that many of the chambers in the caverns were under water as were the passages to get from one chamber to another.
For the most part, anthropologists are not known for their skill in working under water, so they had to recruit help from the student body.
If you think I’m talking about myself, you’ve got another think coming. I was in the English department, not anthropology, and I had no compulsion to go mucking about in flooded subterranean caverns. The guy they got was a close friend of mine named Harry Fisher Reed III. Nowadays it’s Dr. Harry F. Reed III of the Anthropology Department of the University of Calgary, Canada, but back then he was just Chip.
Chipper may well have been the craziest son of a gun I’ve ever known. We were involved in numerous scapegrace escapades together during our college years, but nothing to match this undertaking. He had to learn to use scuba gear to go on this little outing, and his descent into the bowels of the earth was actually the first time he used the stuff other than in the Memphis State swimming pool.
He told me afterwards (yes, he lived through the experience) that some of the passages he and the other members of the expedition had to go through were so narrow, they had to take off their air tanks and shove them through the hole ahead of them.
As it turns out, there was no evidence of humans or much of anything else bigger than a bat ever having made the caverns their home. But if you do visit the caverns, in the visitor’s center, you will find a large display commemorating the exploration, including the name of my old buddy Chip. I once asked him why he did it. He said, “because I thought it would be cool.”